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原始链接: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40447626

本文讨论了对企业垄断的担忧，特别是在杂货、科技和娱乐等行业。它批评司法部 (DoJ) 和联邦贸易委员会 (FTC) 等监管机构对这些问题的反应平淡。作者认为，面对潜在的独裁和丧失个人自由时的冷漠和顺从是有害的。他们强调了联邦贸易委员会最近对亚马逊、沃尔玛等公司采取的法律行动，挑战了各自市场的主导地位。作者鼓励个人通过投票参与民主进程，以影响有利于消费者的政策变化。此外，他们批评司法部门认为宪法修正案优先于反垄断立法，并质疑现代货币理论在应对经济挑战方面的有效性。总体而言，文本强调了公众意识和行动对于确保竞争市场和消费者保护的重要性。

PLEASE make this happen Uncle Sam! i am a lover of music, my friends are lovers of music, the circles i run in on the internet are lovers of music. i cannot express in words how much Live Nation sucks. they are ruining concerts. not only do they have a strangle-hold on venues, but why the hell are they "allowed" to run some in-house scalping ops? i cannot wait for the day i see their demise. i will not pour out a beer for them! sorry for the rant HN. Pearl Jam was right decades ago man.

Note that this follows on the heels of the recent (near?) death of California Senate Bill 829 [0] - which is taking aim at the vertical integration of live performance by Live Nation. If you’re in CA, call your representatives!

With this in mind, to continue your rant…

The anticompetitive behavior of Live Nation is toxic to the music and performing arts industries. It’s the Walmart effect, except consumers end up paying way more because exclusivity contracts prevent competition. Artists sign exclusivity contracts with Live Nation, and onlt play Live Nation Venues. Venues purchased by live nation outbid independent venues until those venues sign exclusivity agreements with Live Nation or die, and then Live Nation pushes up the price.

[0] https://legiscan.com/CA/text/SB829/id/2796147

> but why the hell are they "allowed" to run some in-house scalping ops?

Because the promoters, talent, and talent management are all in on it, TM just agrees to take the heat for its cut.

That is not to say that separating TM from the venues will not help concert goers, but maybe not as much as you might think.

This.

I was a fly on the wall for a conversation with someone who runs a 12k seat venue. They guaranteed Harry Styles $5 million for 2 nights and made it work because.... "secondary". Even the venues are in on the scalping.

The FTC and DoJ have been hitting it out of the park recently, unfortunately, there are a lot of judges out there that think corps should be able to do anything they want.

Corporate America is certainly not a fan of FTC chair Lina Khan. She's been subjected to a barrage of attacks from places like the Wall Street journal so she must be doing something right. Jon Stewart revealed when interviewing her, that Apple executives had asked him not to have her on his podcast.

https://youtu.be/CnC9JV5YtBY?feature=shared

> Corporate America is certainly not a fan of FTC chair Lina Khan.

I think the problem is that some corporate america WOULD be a fan of her, but they either died or had no opportunity to exist in the first place.

They’ve been swinging around a bat a while lot, I haven’t seen them hit the ball much less knock out of the park. At most they’re scaring the pitcher with erratic behaviour.

Most stuff not easy to describe in a few blurbs, imho.

Here’s an article (gift link, so no paywall) that describes the whole situation:

https://wapo.st/4dNEf0z

Good interview with Jon Stewart:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaDTiWaYfcM

Simple examples are:

- Kroger and Albertson’s (grocery stores)

- Illumina and Grail (cancer detection)

- Amazon for dark patterns regarding signing up for prime, and for privacy violations with Alexa and Ring

- Lost challenge to Microsoft and Activision-Blizzard (good to look into, not sure about the specific case)

- FTC released a framework for anti-trust that should be a regulatory win.

I wouldn't say they're hitting it out of the park; I'd say they've been doing what they were supposed to be doing but haven't in the last 20+ years. Having said that, it's nice to see they've finally woken up after all these years.

I want to see them go after the credit card companies. They can start by passing usury laws that cap interest at 10%.

It's beyond the scope of the agency, but we need comprehensive statutory privacy protection. There's a massive industry around acquiring and selling data that's far bigger than just the credit reporting agencies. It'd be mostly a waste of time trying to approach it piecemeal.

I couldn’t find a single major case that has brought meaningful change in the last 3 years since Biden was elected.

That’s not meant to be a political statement about Biden. But I’m assuming you are talking about the current DOJ/FTC.

Yeah not allowing 2 crappy, low margin, and low combined market share grocers who have to compete with Walmart and Amazon to not merge was really knocking it out of the park. /s

It’s not all the judges fault. The DOJ has been bringing weak cases with poor arguments.

The LiveNation/TicketMaster case should be a slam dunk. But I seriously doubt the competence of the current DOJ.

Election year.

They know the judges won't let anything bad happen to their friends so they can pretend to act tough every four years (when the billionaire class's preferred candidate/party is in office of course).

I don't understand people like you. A government agency does something material to help the consumer and you just shit talk and resort to base cynicism. Nothing would ever change if everyone was as apathetic as you are.

What democratic representation?

> “The preferences of the average American appear to have only a miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”

Democracy doesn’t mean “every voter gets what they want,” it means every voter gets a fair opportunity to compromise with every other voter.

The primary thing that causes drift from fairness is lack of voter turnout.

This defeatist attitude is unhelpful. Are you prepared to lose nearly everything come November? What will you do when the dictatorship looms over you, will you accept your dwindling freedoms? What would cause you to actually stand up for yourself and fight for a better future? I see this attitude espoused a lot and I wonder if any of the people who say so will just roll over and accept a creeping totalitarianism with a shrug. Is there literally anything at all that you'd be proactive about?

If you have causes you are passionate about but you refuse to participate in the (hard won, bloodily won) civic right of voting, then your ability to affect those causes will evaporate. No matter how much you think your government doesn't care now, they will care even less when it is truly, wholly, dictatorially unaccountable to you. And then what? What was your anti-voting stance for?

A substantial chunk of the electorate seems to prefer losing and then whining about outcomes as long as it allows them to pat themselves on the back for 'staying above it all and seeing the futility all along'. I implore you instead to care, hold your officials accountable, and vote. A bad future is not inevitable.

Dictators can actually get something done for you, I'd prefer that to our current anarcho-tyranny.

"Francis's term "anarcho-tyranny" refers to armed dictatorship without rule of law, or a Hegelian synthesis when the state tyrannically or oppressively regulates citizens' lives yet is unable or unwilling to enforce fundamental protective law."

Can you describe precisely why you think the US meets this definition? Given that these terms are meaningful only in a relative sense, it’d be useful to hear your explanation as a comparison between e.g. Mexico, Somalia, Russia, or whatever other comparisons you find salient.

> Dictators can actually get something done for you, I'd prefer that to our current [x]

the historical track record of that sentiment is both plenty long and plenty awful. Are you ignorant of that history or dispute it or think it’ll be different this time or what?

Given that you chose to quote from a noted white supremacist scholar, it is likely fair to assume that you fall on the same side as the hypothetical impending dictatorship. In that case, sure, the dictatorship will get something done for you. Until of course the leopard comes to eat your face as well. Also in that case, I can see why you promote your narrative of helplessness, since it will hasten the arrival of your glorious new era.

All regulation has a cost. And if based on the track record of the US government, it tends to be high and even potentially introduce weird incentives that solve one problem but create two more.

Lack of regulation has costs too. I’m open to your argument if you can demonstrate somehow what “tends” to be true. I suspect you can’t, and neither can I, which is why we should assess regulations on a case by case basis of their own merits instead of totally unsupportable “regulation good” or “regulation bad” maxims.

Anti-trust has a proven record of making things less shit. It doesn't work if you don't use it, obviously. Courts are unfortunately not built for your instant gratification.

When it comes to holding corporations accountable for their actions, very little actually does ever change. Our entire system treats business/corporations with kid gloves, and it's not a partisan issue that will change with a different party in control.

DOJ has been filing aggressive antitrust cases throughout the Biden administration’s tenure. If you want to be conspiratorial, you can point to their losing record in court and argue they know the cases will fail, but “it’s an election year” doesn’t make sense. I think the realistic take is the people at DOJ are legitimately enacting the strongest antitrust enforcement they can get away with (and then some).

The FTC leadership has made a number of strange (and in my opinion poor) decisions, beginning with insulting and alienating the agency staff, which had experience that the political appointees lacked. They then proceeded to act without regard to previous agency experience. At this point, it seems like they’re just trying to get their political goals back on track, though it seems a bit late, given that administrations are generally most effective at their beginnings.

Apparently career staffers don’t like Khan. You know; the career staffers that, checks notes, have been at a largely ineffectual FTC for decades. Oh well, at least she’s trying.

https://judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/republicans-j...

There is a great deal of documentation and discussion, but this document covers some of it, here are a couple of on-topic quotes:

>"Documents from and testimony by FTC managers show that Chair Khan marginalized the litigators and investigators at the FTC who had the skills necessary to win cases."

>"One manager consulted with his team and reported to the Chief of Staff that Chair Khan was “[s]capegoating the career staff for the FTC’s ‘underenforcement’ of the antitrust laws”26 and “contributing to an external narrative that denigrates staff.”"

I wouldn't read too much into this document. It's written by one of the most egregious political hacks on the planet: Jim Jordan. Even in this report, he can't resist using the classic "Democrat" epithet at the tippy-top of page 5 [1]. Jordan also subpoenaed Khan after the FTC took action against Elon Musk—Republicans' second-favorite billionaire they'll defend at all costs.

This document reads like political theater because it is political theater.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democrat_Party_(epithet)

Going after ticket master makes no sense and would accomplish nothing. Artist set the price of their tickets, ticketmaster is a middleman/scapegoat. Seems it whole scheme worked perfectly if most think they're to blame.

Live Nation owns a significant swathe of venues in America, and requires that artists use Ticketmaster if they want to be able to play those venues. And they continue to buy up more and more venues. Not sure how you can say this integration is just them being 'scapegoated'.

And it's the promoters, on behalf of the artists, who helped secure all those exclusive deals.

Taylor Swift didn't become a billionaire because of Ticketmaster fees.

Live Nation-Ticketmaster’s monopoly and colluding practices are what’s enabling them. Going after them definitely accomplishes a whole lot.

Additionally, if artists were to continue the high prices in a more transparent manner without them, then that’s fine - it’s a free country and a free market.

Anyone who goes to concerts understands this.

This is exactly why this board is a waste of time. Half of what you read on here are people talking about things they have no idea about and/or no vested interest in the outcome.

Just a large collection of wankers.

Unfortunately, anti-trust is all case law.

The Sherman Antitrust Act is one paragraph long.

9 constitutional amendments are only one sentence long, not even a paragraph!

It's all case law.

But judges care way more about constitutional amendments than Sherman Antitrust Act. Most have limited intellectual interest in the problems it tackles.

And really, who cares about the price of concert tickets, online ads and in-app purchase fees? These guys went to law school not business school.

They. Just. Don't. Care.

Could the DoJ and FTC make them care as much about antitrust as like, at least 2 amendments? Yes.

I have no idea how the DoJ and FTC have failed to drum up excitement about this stuff. Nobody is going to rule against the status quo without passionate feelings about it.

That is by design, no? Sherman act does not address a lot of modern anti-trust, as you mentioned. We need new legislation.

Judges can just as easily find pet causes that don’t align with your interests, I don’t think that’s the mechanism you or I want our country to rely on.

All three of the main US federal antitrust laws (Sherman Act, Clayton Act, and FTC Act) have neen amended since originally adopted, and the FTC act also creates regulatory authority which the FTC has regularly exercised. Even ignoring case law evolution, US antitrust law hasn't been static.

> The Sherman Antitrust Act is one paragraph long

The original Sherman Act has 7 sections (one additional was later added) one of which has two subsections, none of which have multiple paragraphs, for a total of 8 paragraphs.

More to the point, US antitrust law isn't just the Sherman Act and case law, because:

1. There are two other main antitrust-related statutes, the Clayton Act and the Federal Trade Commission Act, and

2. The FTC Act as well as its direct mandates also creates regulatory authority for the FTC,

3. In addition to federal antitrust law in the US, there is also state antitrust law.

> But judges care way more about constitutional amendments than Sherman Antitrust Act.

I'm not sure what the bases for your intuition about how much judges care about those things are; there is certainly a sense in which Constitutional provisions definitionally have priority over statute and administrative law, but its hardly as if antitrust law isn't an area that has gotten extremely detailed judicial attention.

Because they've had the entire term to take action and the only reason anything is happening now it to attempt to build some momentum going into the election itself. Soon as it's over, everything most likely goes away.

It takes time and work to put together cases like this. I look at it the other way: they've only had three years, and have already done some impressive things.

In this case, because I don't expect Biden to win another term and I expect the prosecution of this case to take longer than a year. The last several administrations have opened their term by tearing down everything that the prior administration had done. To be specific: I'm not confident the prosecutor behind this will have a job at the end of the year.

I genuinely think that if Biden does not win another term there are far larger problems for the American project than Ticketmaster, including democracy existing as we know it today.

On your opposite side, they think if Biden wins babies will die horrible deaths.

American politics are full of superlatives, and very devoid of any real actions. Once the hero or the devil gets elected, nothing happens much.

>including democracy existing as we know it today.

Weren't there similar predictions back in 2016? How is it different this time? Or to back up a bit, what exactly does "democracy existing as we know it today" mean? It could mean anything between "US becomes North Korea" and "the whitehouse revoked the press credentials of someone who said something mean about trump".

>It wasn't wrong in 2016 either, what's your point?

Of course "it wasn't wrong" if claims are vague like "democracy as we know it", which means they can be used in a motte-and-bailey manner to initially imply that the US is going to turn into China/North Korea or whatever, but then later be walked back on to whatever the predictions don't really pan out.

>That the coup failed and Congress wasn't murdered doesn't mean they didn't try.

Was the claim back then that they'll "try" (however poorly planned/executed), or that they'll actually succeed?

The general thought was that a simpleton business monkey who made a virtue out of ordering people around and not accepting "no" for an answer would continue to operate autocratically even as the leader of a democratic bureaucracy.

There was a lot of equivocating that it was all some campaign schtick, the media was misrepresenting him, etc. "4D chess" and all that.

It turned out that the straightforward analysis was the correct one. Sometimes a spade really is a spade.

This round he's playing for double or nothing - having broken a bunch of laws is slowly catching up with him. He continues playing the victim while indignantly expressing a desire for overt revenge. We've already seen the mechanisms by which this will happen (paralysis of federal law enforcement, mobilization of paramilitary goon squads into the power vacuum, and political reality distortion field justifying everything as if President is equivalent to Dictator). So yeah by any reasoned analysis, 2024 really is Trump xor America - you decide.

(Once again, standard disclaimer - unaligned libertarian here. I'd never voted for a major party candidate before 2020. Specifically, I considered a 2016 a toss up between two differently-bad options, and still have no regrets there. But now that we've seen a concrete track record as opposed to mere vacuous campaigning, it would be utterly foolish to ignore it)

I'm pretty sure that if the incumbent conservative President loses to the radical reactionaries, that incoming administration will be tearing down much more than merely the prior administration - more like two hundred years of the painstaking progress we now take for granted.

(Just for context here, lest the postmodern fence-sitters write me off as some rabid partisan - I'm an unaligned libertarian who had never voted for a major candidate in a national election before 2020)

To the contrary, I've been paying very close attention. I'm just not confident that the DoJ can pull this off before the end of the Biden administration.

Rescheduling marijuana is a multistep regulatory process set out in law that Biden initiated with an executive order the month before the 2022 midterm election, so its kind of weird to call it election year pandering.

Rescheduling is not descheduling.

It's better but it's still a half measure and far away from the blanket pardons that the President (any president) needs to be signing asap.

I get the whole "progress is slow thing" but this is a case of politicians being the only slow ones. A supermajority of the public supports alcohol/marijuana parity.

Biden held significant sway in the country as VP from 2009-2016 and now again from 2021-2024. The fact that he chose to do the bare minimum on the last possible year 12 years into the job with less of a majority than he’s had in the past right as his election polls are starting to tank certainly seems telling.

I think the objection is the timing. If the administration truly cared about such things, they'd do them in non-election years. But they seem to save up these things for election years so people feel listened to.

Right, right, right. So what we really need is for politicians to be consistent and never do anything at all, including during election years, because they don’t really mean any of it (as we wise folk all know).

I think your perspective might be...tainted. I kid, I kid. But typically it's spelled "perineum" just fyi. I'd be interested in seeing a non-crank source for your assertion. Everything I've read suggests that it'll likely be inflation-neutral or slightly reduce inflation over the next 10 years. Even if spending on it gets up to a trillion dollars over a ten year span, you're still talking about one tenth of what gets spent on defense contractors and the military every year.

> But typically it's spelled "perineum" just fyi

It's a very old mispelling that I'm sticking with.

> I'd be interested in seeing a non-crank source for your assertion. Everything I've read suggests that it'll likely be inflation-neutral or slightly reduce inflation over the next 10 years.

Over the next 10 years, maybe. But circulating money that didn't exist before (that's what happens when the government increases the debt) devalues existing currency proportionally. It is, by definition, inflation. It's effectively a flat tax which disproportionately affects the poor (as all flat taxes do).

The result is an _immediate_ spike in inflation that _maybe_ cools if the projected revenue is real (it often isn't). That inflation had been staved off for the last... two decades or so by lowering interest rates, encouraging people to spend money they wouldn't otherwise (or borrow it themselves) thereby increasing their buying power and offsetting their devalued currency.

Unfortunately, you can't lower interest rates forever and so, when they reach rock bottom, all your inflation chickens come home to roost.

> Even if spending on it gets up to a trillion dollars over a ten year span, you're still talking about one tenth of what gets spent on defense contractors and the military every year.

Spending more money you don't have is worse than spending less money you don't have.

> I'd be interested in seeing a non-crank source for your assertion.

Back to that though... The reason why the government is spending the way it is recently is because of Modern Monetary Theory[1]. Politicians love it because it says they can spend as much money as they want and debt doesn't matter. They don't really believe it though because they only implement the part where they get to spend all the money you want and the debt doesn't matter. I don't think it's very controversial to consider the "mainstream" (in quotes because the reason they are mainstream is because politicians and political think tanks love them, they aren't actually mainstream among economists) MMT sources to be the cranks.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_monetary_theory

Yes. I think that is the objection. But it's absurd. It's not like the FTC has been sitting on its hands the past 3 years. Last year, for example, they sued Amazon for illegally maintaining a monopoly. In 2022, they sued Walmart for facilitating money-transfer fraud, Harley Davidson for illegally restricting customers' rights to repair, countless health insurers to block illegal mergers. In 2021 they sued Frontier Communications for advertising false internet speeds, Lockheed Martin from illegally acquiring Aerojet Rocketdyne Holdings, Nvidia from acquiring Arm Ltd, etc. There are hundreds of cases this FTC has brought in the past 3 years. Cynically saying "LOL ELECTION YEAR" at this case, because it's the first case you've paid attention to is just... so comically predictable.

Isn't it an open secret that large venues contracted Ticketmaster expressly to do price fixing? It's collusion as much as monopolism. They run operations and absorb all the bad press.

Are you arguing that they aren't hurting consumers? Just look at ticket prices over the years as more and more competition was eliminated, as well as the tactics they use to control artists. You aren't going to have much luck I suspect.

I was just looking at that last night.

[Artist that was super popular in 2006ish] tickets when we went at the absolute height of his popularity were $40 for lawn seats at a local venue

[Same artist] at the same venue in the same lawn seating is now $380.

What's the difference? Guess who bought the venue.

> What's the difference?

Disposable income of target audience.

Greater number of people in target audience.

Fewer shows.

Technology enabling more accurate pricing so each customer is able to be targeted to pay as much as they can afford (price discrimination).

Etc.

Don't forget 2024 you probably has a much higher disposable income than 2006 you... And might be willing to pay to feel young again for a few hours.

Off to buy some late 90s band tickets!

Yet nobody seems to ever ask whether or not the merger is a question of survival - would TM or LN poof out of existence if they didn't have this release valve? - or simply just another attempt to stifle existing competition in the market.

People who are really opposed to this will probably think this is wildly off base, but if it came to pass...isn't that worse than one company absorbing the other because although the endgame is similar, it's messier and doesn't necessarily improve the overall situation.

An example: Barclays acquisition of Lehman Brothers business in North America in 2008 after the latter imploded. They had an agreement in principle, but the government balked, so it happened after the fact...bringing an even larger crisis along with it.

If the company is in such a bad state that the only thing keeping it alive is a monopolistic control of the market and much hated business practices, do we really want it running a significant chunk of the economy? Or is it better to watch it burn to allow better companies to emerge?

Personally, I think that if a company can’t survive with competition, it shouldn’t survive. That is a fundamental and necessary tenant of capitalism. It may cause pain in the short term, but it will eventually lead to a healthier market.

As was often repeated back in the Great Recession, if a company is too big to fail, then maybe it’s too big to exist.

Doesn't ticket master sell most tickets for far below market value? How does this hurt consumers? Are they forcing artists to sell below market value or something?

No.

I am pointing out that being a monopoly (i.e. the only business choosing to offer a product/service) is not illegal.

Engaging in anticompetive behavior is illegal. And the Justice Dept has accused Ticketmaster of doing that.

technically you are correct but this isn't a thread of lawyers/attorneys, this is a thread with higher than average autism. Cleaving words and being clever with 'harmless' misdirection and turn of phrase is not welcome.

As I understand it, a wrinkle with this distinction is that having a monopoly through sheer competitive goodness isn't illegal, but actively trying to construct a monopoly almost always is illegal. And with the benefit of hindsight, I don't see how Ticketmaster's acquisition of Live Nation can be construed in good faith as anything but the latter.

I agree that is what is the law is and even that that is what the law should be. It is also important to note however that the actual title of the Sherman Antitrust Act is "An Act to protect trade and commerce against unlawful restraints and monopolies." So it isn't fair to say that anti-competitive practices and monopolies are completely orthogonal (although strictly speaking they are) because monopolies are a perfect tool with which to engage in anti-competitive practices. In my opinion I don't think protecting entertainment from anti-competitive practices even matters that much anyway though. Your ability to watch your favorite singer live is really not the same as something like oil or trains which are actually important to the economy.

Pardon my ignorance here, as I don't actually attend concerts, but to play something of devil's advocate...

Isn't the secondary market for tickets- scalpers and such- significantly more expensive than what Ticketmaster is selling the tickets for? Which is to say, aren't the tickets sold below market value?

I'm not entirely clear on how there being more competition would help consumers.

Ticketmaster enables "scalping" by offering a secondary market on their own platform. They have a vested interest in this, and due to a lack of real competition they have no reason to realign incentives. Meaningful competitors could do all sorts of things that make a difference in this area.

Consumers are also the people running the concerts themselves (performers and whatnot) who have bad experiences with Ticketmaster but don't really have an alternative. Lower fees, non-exclusivity terms, etc.

Keep in mind that effectively TM/LN sells tickets on the secondary market.

Just because tickets are on the "resale" market doesn't mean they were bought by Jane Doe and she can't go anymore so she's re-listing them. For some concerts only 8% of the tickets are actually available at the listed price, the remaining 92% are all available either as a special offer (credit cards) or given to various individuals associated with the event (such as the headliner) who can then immediately put them up for resale.

The monopoly is really the artists, who then delegate to the venues. Like, Bruce Springsteen ticket prices are high because only he is Bruce Springsteen and nobody else is. The real monopoly is on being Bruce Springsteen. Prices are high because of supply and demand for that artist; Bruce Springsteen can only put on so many shows for so many seats and there is far more demand than that, no matter who is selling the tickets.

Live Nation-Ticketmaster only gets the monopoly power delegated from the artists and venues. If you break that up into competing ticket providers, that doesn't do anything to the underlying prices, tickets will still be resold on secondary markets until the prices reach supply-demand equilibrium.

Busting LN-TM hypothetically doesn't even do anything to the fees. The market is set by what customers will pay, and it doesn't matter to them what the breakdown is between going to the middlemen or going to the artist. At most, busting LN-TM does create competition for lower fees, so that the artist gets more of the revenue. But it's not clear at all that that's a matter for courts to forcibly impose.

(I see the downvotes. The Internet hivemind will always think it's entitled to ignore the laws of supply and demand, even on HN. Ticket prices are high because demand exceeds supply and customers choose to pay it, not because of a monopolistic reseller entity.)

You're really missing the point.

The issue here isn't that top artists can't sell their tickets at a high price. It's that venues have exclusivity deals w/ ticketmaster/livenation and ticketmaster/livenation ultimately charge outrageous fees to consumers no matter what. Then often their own reselling arm is involved in the scalping behavior.

The artists aren't reaping these fees. Ticketmaster/livenation is capturing the entirety of the profit and artists don't really have a choice in using a different ticketing vendor in most cases (since it's common for every major venue in a city to have strong-armed exclusivity contracts w/ ticketmaster/livenation).

> ultimately charge outrageous fees to consumers

By and large, it is the venues and promoters that set large fees. The reason they like TM is because TM will take the blame for charging those fees when in reality, they're kicked back.

Of course, the problem is that in many cases now, Live Nation owns the venues and acts as the promoters, so those kickbacks started going, ultimately, to the company charging them.

I can't believe that when a company owns the venues and the tickets, mandates buying tickets from themselves then adds a huge markup to every ticket someone would actually blame the entertainers for having name recognition.

> The market is set by what customers will pay [...] The Internet hivemind will always think it's entitled to ignore the laws of supply and demand

And this is why "the market" isn't perfect, and flat-out sucks for some things. It doesn't have to be this way. Springsteen should be able to say "I want to charge $40 per ticket so my loyal fans, no matter what their financial situation, can see me perform", without having to deal with the scum of the earth buying up those tickets and reselling them for $300 each. (Whether or not he would want to do this is another question.)

The funny thing is that this setup is perfectly possible now that we have all this digital infrastructure. Back when tickets were just a piece of paper that people bought anonymously from a box office, it was damn near impossible to stop people from scalping them. Today we can tie a ticket to a person's real name, and check IDs at the venue. We can prohibit ticket transfers, or at least require that they be done via the same marketplace where they were purchased, so they can only be resold for the amount they were originally paid for.

Supply and demand are only laws when you allow a market to set prices, instead of letting a the seller price how they want, and sell directly to only their final end customers.

If this were the case, you'd have a hundred million people wanting to pay that to see Springsteen but only a hundred thousand seats exist. How do you decide which of them gets the seats?

- First come, first served

- Auction

- Lottery system

- A combination of all 3

None of these are perfect, especially if demand greatly exceeds supply, but there's plenty of flexibility in how an artist could sell tickets to their fans, if it weren't for monopolies like TM/LN. The "Market" would still be in play here, as an artist could decide to cater to specific people (i.e. the rich) via bids, or be more accessible but elusive via ticket lotteries.

I am so hopeful that this happens. I was comparing the fees to see a band in the US or EU recently based on their tour dates and it was insane what US ticket prices came out to be. It was ~$54 for a ticket in the US because of all the junk fees and just 8 euros for other places in the EU.

Recently, I bought tickets through their web page, and the seat hold timed out prematurely, making me reselect seats.

The tickets had been on sale for weeks, but in that 60 second window, scalpers just happened to buy the exact block I wanted out of 100’s of available seats.

Of course, ticket master owns some of the scalper companies.

Despite the blatant false advertising / auction fixing, I have no way to prove the above happened.

Anyway, a breakup of that company can’t come soon enough.

I’ve posted this before but I was fooled by a StubHub setup that looked like it was the venue itself - and not accidentally. So when I bought a ticket I was shocked to get an email from StubHub.

When I double checked and found the venue I had overpaid by 100% and StubHub refused to refund me.

I think there's a non-zero chance that scalpers are watching the list of available ticket blocks, comparing frequently to find when a block becomes unavailable (because it's in a cart), and then monitoring and automatically buying any "missing" ticket blocks as soon as they reappear. That's what I would do, anyways.

That said, I would not be surprised in the least if this was being aided by ticketmaster or they were straight up doing it themselves. I just think there is a possible explanation where they are ignorant rather than malicious.

I can't speak to your particular case, but my ticketmaster transactions often fail to complete for various reasons. After one falls through, if I wish to purchase the same seats again, they're often unavailable. This isn't because some scalper swooped in and bought them, the person who has dibs on them is me, in my previous defunct transaction. I usually find that if I wait ~ 15 minutes the hold will be released, and the tickets will be available for me to try again.

Let's however not get too caught up in feel-goodism that somehow breaking up Ticketmaster is ridding the live entertainment industry of some external leech that everyone hated.

You should realize that venues and artists are equally beneficiaries of what Ticketmaster enables. In a sense they enjoy having Ticketmaster be the hated scapegoat for high prices that they then also enjoy the benefits of.

Without Ticketmaster who knows how much less tickets would sell for. And venues get paid a cut by Ticketmaster. Artists get paid a cut by Ticketmaster. Sometimes those parties are glad for that value extraction from the concertgoer to be done on their behalf, and to be blamed on an entity that diverts attention from the fact that they want more $ too.

Ticketmaster did not just emerge to prey on an unwilling helpless industry. They occupy a niche that is part of a semi willing ecosystem.

A lot of artists are not happy about this. Selling seats to the highest bidder to maximize revenue of a given show is not necessarily in the long-term interests of an artist.

the huge upcharge on tickets is usually from scalpers that are allowed to buy and resell on the platform. are artists and venues somehow in on the scalping? I have suspected as much, but I have no evidence.

A large part of this is there are several companies that are effectively the modernized scalpers using very high dollar pay-per click advertising, and incredibly complex optimization methods to charge the maximum markup they can. Most of them use each other as well, in cooperation via affiliate kickbacks more than competition.

Then, add in ticket brokers, with pre-reserved sets and blocks of tickets, feeding into that, and everyone is getting a cut. Not a small cut either. I do have evidence, as I worked for two of the companies for a while.

This is great news but: Please also stop giving Ticketmaster your money. Every dollar you voluntarily give them (for a totally optional product, I might add) encourages them to continue their horrible practices.

"Ticketmaster is such a terrible company!" he says as he buys more concert tickets from them.

That's just not feasible for people who don't have the means to simply fly to Europe to see a band. Sometimes it's a once in a lifetime chance that your favorite band happens to be in your city

Exactly. This is not a food company. We're talking about a product (live event tickets) that is totally optional and which nobody has to buy. This should be the simplest "vote with your wallet" scenario ever. If everyone collectively stopped buying the tickets, they'd either be out of business or be forced to change their practices. People like their bands more than they dislike Ticketmaster, so TM is not going to voluntarily change.

Yeah and this is why I think this will amount to zero changes in ticket prices. People have demonstrated that they will pay. Venues sell out at the current prices. Why would they take less?

It's easy to say that but a lot of the venues Exclusively use Ticketmaster as the official way to buy tickets for their shows. I called one, and they said to go online or pay at the door and hope There are seats left.

I feel many modern environmentalists are selective on what they want to ban; it's typically stuff that wouldn't burden their lives. Case in point, I'll bet most environmentalists drink plastic bottled water.

Next up, replies with reasons why drinking bottled water is ok for environmentalists.

It would be pretty interesting if certain departments in the government could get direct payments. For example if the last $100 on your taxes you could choose any department to allocate to.

I've always wondered what government funding would look like if taxpayers could allocate their tax dollars at their own discretion. I don't think it would be all that functional in practice, but the idea of it seems interesting.

The amount of money going towards advertisement for specific government bodies would explode. Maybe good for civics education, probably not good for the government's budget.

I saw a study where they asked people to estimate the budget and discussed how wrong they got it.

We do have a tiny bit of say with the presidential election fund.

I think the idea would be that the government would collect the same amount of taxes, but the taxpayers would get to directly allocate their portion where they want it to go. They couldn't decide to not pay taxes at all, or even pay less.

I suppose someone could submit a foia request and get a list of the people who donated and how much. I suspect that either nobody is donating to them, or that lots of interesting people/companies are regularly donating large amounts to them.

Well, if you think about it, mass withholding of paying individual income taxes until specific political reforms are made could be an interesting way to cut the MIC, campaign corruption (finance reform), and address the lack of universal single-payer health-care (not Medicare but not quite UK NHS). We're funding horrible shit but voting for the red flavor or the blue flavor of the property party doesn't make a damn bit of difference.

They fixed up the worst part a while back. It used to be that you had to "type" your password by using an onscreen keyboard (to prevent keylogging?). Now it's a normal password field at least.

I'm against most of these government "breakup" actions but there is an exception for every rule. I believe we can all agree that it's okay to disintegrate a company that simultaneously occupies every circle of hell.

Finally. This will be great for indie artists and venues. Hopefully all the local older venues we have here in the US can have a cheaper option to help them flourish.

The Administration is bound by the Due Care clause, but that's a huge window, so you can just intentionally create a dysfunctional and incompetent group of people and give them the responsibility for enforcing this nations laws.

This Administration, although it would hate to actually admit it out loud, actually put someone competent in charge of the agency with this enforcement responsibility and then.. to everyone's absolute surprise.. let them do their job effectively.

Effectiveness is debatable, because they’re not winning cases. I like the targets they’re aiming at, but trying and failing prevents someone more competent from winning the case in the future. Results matter.

It’s been noted by a few folks that anything the administration says out loud immediately becomes gristle for the Fox News-o-verse and therefore something for Congress to yell loudly at and try to block. The Biden administration has consequently become very good at being very quiet about the things it’s doing well, with the distinct drawback in an election year that everyone seems to be quite surprised when they discover the administration has been rather good, actually.

The Biden administration is a textbook example of how to not control any narratives whatsoever and never be able to get any credit. They lost the narrative after Kabul and then just never got it back, despite being one of the most legislatively successful and executively impactful administrations in the last 50 years. Case in point - recent poll that had 50% of voters that listed "climate" as their top priority didn't think this administration has done anything on climate change.

Yes. It's _incredibly_ frustrating. I was not a Biden supporter, but he's gotten some absolutely incredible things accomplished - the IRA alone is so far outside what I thought would've been possible. The word from the actual people actually doing climate work is that, as far as they're concerned, the IRA solves the financing problem and the rest is implementation now, but the average voter apparently has no idea what's been done in that space. Antitrust is another area where the administration is reshaping how the economy works - they're getting a bit more credit here, but it's still widely underappreciated.

I think there was strategic value in keeping things close to the vest, and I'm not sure how much is in their hands and how much is how the media's reporting on all of this, but you're right, their inability to do messaging is going to lead the most economically progressive administration in half a century to be a one-term affair because their own voters haven't updated their priors.

It's so freaking infuriating.

I worked in the ticketing industry in 2007-2010. I remember when the CEO of our small org told us that he talked to the FTC as an industry expert when they were approving the deal. He said he didn't think it would harm competition.

Everyone else, including myself, could see where this was going. I don't know how folks could be that bone-headed even back then.

They worked hard to earn this distinction, their poineering efforts have now been well recognized by none other than the US government, in a way that few others have.

They really pushed it head & shoulders above the rest, regardless of how much alternative orgs have aspired to this type of pursuit.

It couldn't happen to a more deserving bastion of the music industry !

One can only hope they promptly receive their just rewards for everything they have done, and then some, as a shining example to others who might aspire to such a level of accomplishment.

What's the typical turn time for a case like this from the time it is filed to the time it is actually in front of a judge/jury? This particular administration only has a guaranteed relevance of about 7 months. It could get extended, or it could get replaced and then cases like this would most likely get dropped.

So, why bring it now?

I would assume that like most of these kinds of very public cases, they spent a significant amount of time building their case internally before committing to filing suit.

Trying to guess at the internal machinations for how a bureaucracy sets priorities and budgets is a bit of a fools errand though

> This particular administration only has a guaranteed relevance of about 7 months.

That is a deeply cynical view on the nature of politics.

> So, why bring it now?

Why help anyone else if you can't score political points off the back of it? Possibly because it's the right thing to do and ideologically motivated people actually do successfully exist in government.

> That is a deeply cynical view on the nature of politics.

How? If the bid for re-election is lost, they leave office Jan 20th. That's not cynical. That's being able to read a calendar.

If you think a new administration, specifically the one that would be coming in, will not immediately reverse a lot of things, then you just have not been paying attention.

Then they just handed them that victory without extracting any sort of price.

The incoming challenger is riding on a "populist" base. These polices are legitimate "populist" policies. The strategy here is obvious.

I'm theory, prosecutions are a civil service function, not a political function. Changes in administration might change the leadership and what areas are prioritized, but once you have a case, it really shouldn't matter who is in office.

In theory.

The vast majority of cases aren’t dropped when you move from one administration to another. However, there’s a great deal of correlation between cases people care about and politics so you’re more likely to hear about the kinds of cases that get dropped.

I agree that most political factions actually agree on most policies, but that doesn’t mean the decision as to whether to proceed is ‘civil service’ rather than ‘political’.

Political sure, but I don’t think you can call something politics without there being some debate.

Should we build a road is a classic political choice because people disagree even if it’s generally a net positive. Should we prosecute a murderer may qualify if there’s some twist (ex stand your ground) but not in the general case.

> Should we build a road is a classic political choice because people disagree even if it’s generally a net positive. Should we prosecute a murderer may qualify if there’s some twist (ex stand your ground) but not in the general case.

What laws get passed/repealed are decided on by people elected to office. Policies and priorities for departments are decided upon by political appointees. Decisions on cases though? Those are generally delegated to the civil service.

Now, from a practical standpoint, there's obviously ways you can muck with policies and priorities that can impact a particular case, just like there are ways that you can change the laws to muck with a particular case (you may recall when Florida went after Disney, they had to bend over backwards to draw up the law such that they could claim they weren't explicitly going after one company), but that's exactly the kind of stuff that draws criticism (and there are rules against it). There is absolutely a principle of independence & impartiality of the DOJ that's been the norm, even if recently that norm has been eroded.

Agreed. It largely immaterial to the issue. I'm curious though, what political appointees in the DOJ do you see evidence of making decisions to drop or pick up specific cases?

"I want you to make sure this case goes nowhere, can you do that?"

"No!"

Fires leadership

"I want you to make sure this case goes nowhere, can you do that?"

"You got it!"

Hires

There certainly is some of this every administrative change over.

Exactly this. The first few days in office, a new POTUS will typically use executive orders specifically to reverse policies the previous administration put in place.

Yes, the administration can change policies, but dropping cases is another matter. Certainly policy changes can have an effect on cases, but it's not like cases get dropped at some dramatic rate when a new administration comes in.

> different mechanism

POTUS: Mr Attorney General, it is this administrations agenda to no longer pursue these specific cases: anything with me as the defendant.

AG: Understood Mr POTUS, we'll back burner everything that cannot just be stopped or dropped.

In the article, they mention both the Trump and Biden administrations initiating investigations. Only since Obama, has this been “approved”.

What leads you to believe it would most likely be dropped?

Because the next admin has already declared their policy will be of reversing anything and everything the current admin has done. Out of spite for the most part, but this one also happens to be something that hurts business so it'll be ripe for them to want to remove limiting a corp.

One of the signature policies Biden is running on is his fight against junk fees. That's why this is will overlap the election. And why no one would be surprised if nothing happened if Biden lost.

> relevance of about 7 months

Okay, buddy.

Regardless of your political leanings, Biden himself extended a deeply reviled policy on handling border refugees. I think the “cooler” view is that they’re just figureheads.

Finally. This merger ought to have been blocked from the get-go, but better late than never. Concert ticket prices and fees are completely out of control.

It would be nice to have competition among sellers within a given venue. Even give the venue the option to sell single seats (rather than large blocks at some bulk rate).

For security reasons the ticket format should probably be the venue's choice, the bulk/block rate would probably include a specific time window for the bulk buyer to have their bonded agent print off the tickets on the venue's hardware.

I'm very interested to see what that kind of competition would do to ticket prices. I've often seen Ticketmaster painted as the "designated fall-guy" for consumers to hate instead of the venues and acts which are (according to this argument) the source of a lot of the junk fees. This is also the position that Ticketmaster claims as a defense [1], so it's hard to know what to believe in the absence of competition.

[1] https://www.cnn.com/business/live-news/ticketmaster-taylor-s...

What punishment will the executives receive?

This will not prevent any future execs from aggressively building another such monopoly, causing years of financial and other harm.

They still walk away with their bags of cash. Their names won't even be tarnished so they can go right back to doing the same thing.

Finally. As someone who is active in the local music scene, I’ve spent thousands on junk fees over the years. Not sure why it has taken this long.

Yeah, it’s not just failing to break up monopolies, it’s allowing mergers to go through that would’ve been laughably doomed to fail to pass regulatory muster in earlier decades.

Stock buybacks didn't used to be allowed either, but trillions of dollars have been pulled out of companies to pump stocks in the last several years.

Well, there was arguably a point to be had in the 90s for relaxing standards.

The web was new.

It was allowing over the top and disruption of a lot of legacy businesses.

It wasn't clear what constituted a market in those times.

However, by 2009, standards should have been reimposed. That largely didn't happen. Regulators simply got used to letting things go through, and so they kept doing that.

If that was the reason, they should have restricted it to tech companies. Instead, things like traditional media and food became harmfully consolidated over the same time.

The thinking was, and IMHO there's some merit to this, "giant new tech companies are going to be created by this thing called the web, so maybe legacy companies need to divest / merge to meet the competition."

And I'd argue a lot of non-defense government philosophy was also following DoD's "the Cold War is over, budgets will shrink, so defense companies need to merge to survive."

> Sources familiar with the matter said that while the two companies had been in constant touch with antitrust agencies in the UK, EU, and United States to work out a path to close the deal, the UK regulators have in recent weeks indicated that it would require remedies for Adobe to divest Figma design, a core asset of the acquisition.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/adobe-figma-terminate-20-...

> On December 18, 2023, Figma and Adobe both announced they were mutually agreeing to abandon their merger,[17][18] with Adobe citing that there was "no clear path to receive necessary regulatory approvals from the European Commission and the UK Competition and Markets Authority."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Figma#Attempted_acquisition_by...

Only if you count UK/EU regulators.

Particularly for the local music scene, where Live Nation usually isn't the promoter, the junk fees aren't coming from them.

Gotta remember Ticketmaster's margins are actually pretty thin.

Which is on the low side for an entertainment software company. Also worth noting that most of their Ticketing growth is coming from international markets, where they aren't at all a monopoly, and yet the margins there are the same... and it is even more misleading than that, the denominator for that margin isn't including the bulk of the price people are paying for the ticket, which flows through to venues (where the margins are even lower). Per said same report, if you add Ticketing & Converts --and Ticketmaster sells tickets for a lot of other customers who aren't Live Nation, so if anything that is under-counting the total value of the tickets sold by Ticketmaster-- the combined margin is around 8%. So that's ~8% of the money you spend on a ticket that is going to Live Nation.

In fairness though, I did misspeak. The margins on ticket resale are quite big (and that's a driver of much of the profit margin in that report). That's usually not what people are referring to when they say "junk fees".

When people refer to "junk fees", they're normally talking about the fees associated with primary ticket sales, which have much lower margins (closer to 7-8%), because most of the money for those fees flows through to the other parties involved in the event. This has all been documented on several occasions. TM's blog actually recently put out a decent article walking people through it: https://blog.ticketmaster.com/the-truth-about-ticket-prices/.

The primary ticket sales service game is largely about volume. You've got an absurd amount of money being exchanged, so taking a small bit of it can work out to significant revenue, but it doesn't dramatically change the price people end up paying for their tickets.

To me, worse than the fees, is all the crap "promotions" that Ticketmaster tries to get you in on after you decide to buy your ticket from the venue... and it's a pretty good signal about the low margins on those sales. It's super annoying, but it makes sense for them to do it because any lost sales at the end of the funnel there are comparatively a small price to pay for the money they're getting from the promotions (which generate about half as much revenue for Live Nation as ticketing, but at less than a third of the cost).

No question that people are getting a raw deal when they buy tickets on Ticketmaster, but the perception of the problem is really different from the reality.

[For transparency: I spent 7 years in the live events industry. I now have nothing to do with it.]

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