The only YC company[1] I can find in this space seems to be DOA.
[1] https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/the-ticket-fairy
It's essentially the venues and artists outsourcing the job of "being the asshole" to TicketMaster as a large chunk of the money eventually flow back. They get to publicly blame TicketMaster, claim they have no involvement, and still get their slice of the "processing fees".
If you are attending any event and you can actually buy the tickets directly at the box office then go that route. You'll likely save anywhere from 25-60% off the price of the tickets. Plus you'll get actual physical tickets.
Sure this doesn't work for some crazy in demand show, but nobody goes to those anyway right?
My partner and I created, to our knowldge, the first ticketting system with live purchasing for seats at a stadium where you could choose your seats. Ticket master was not doing this at the time.
We drew the stadium with squares. It showed reserved, and purchased seats while selecting. It even picked the best possible seating so it wouldn't leave one spot vacant if you choose the "get me the best availble seats for N people option".
It was a huge success for a stadium that seated 8k people.
After the event was over, the main attraction host team asked us if we could do the ticketing system for their games. Their games were at the ACC. After a couple weeks they came back and told us it wasn't possible because Ticket Master had the rights to the stadium.
So what did we do? University was stating up soon so we went back to school. My business mind didn't even think to turning it into a service back then because we assumed ticket master controlled everything.
Forever facepalm.
- Selling tickets is hard. I mean really hard. By coincidence, I just hit my 14 year mark at Google. I also spent 5 years at Yahoo! in the early 2000s. I'd like to think I've seen hard technical problems over my career. And again, ticketing is hard.
- There's not that much money it. Especially relative to the technical challenge.
- Most of the thoughts here are how to build a ticketing system that fans want. Ticketmater could already do that.
There's a few things about ticketing people don't realize:
(1) Ticketmaster doesn't own tickets. They don't see the prices. They don't set the fees. These are typically by the promoter or the artist.
(2) Ticketmaster doesn't keep much of the fees. Read LiveNation's financials. Last time I checked, I think Ticketmaster was keeping about $3 per ticket on average (i.e. revenues / tickets sold). Almost all the fees go to other parties in the value chain -- venues, promoters, artists.
https://www.amazon.com/Ticket-Masters-Concert-Industry-Scalp...
As long as there is an arbitrage opportunity and its incredibly profitable this will always exist. Tickets are priced too low, and there are very sophisticated companies who's only purpose is to buy and resell. This was SeatGeek's original premise to optimize when to sell and buy.
I'm not really even sure what the complaints are... yes theres limited quantity and incredible demand. The only real solution is you limit who can buy by price or exclusivity.
In a sense this situation came about because people want ticket prices to be ‘fair’. They don’t want to pay $500 for some concert even if that should be the market price. So it gets priced at $100 instead and Ticketmaster allows venues to recoup part of that with fees.
A startup may offer a "10% better" set of features, but that's not enough for the venue to justify the large switching costs and large risk that would be involved in trying out a competing product.
For such a switch to be justified, the alternative product's feature set would have to be 100x better -- a "gamechanger" that fundamentally alters the way the venue does business, not merely offers minor improvements.
Point 1: Let her sell it on a different website.
Yesterday, Ticketmaster said millions, but it was probably more than 10 million people, logged in to try to buy hundreds of thousands of products. Each product has inventory=1, and you're not allowed to double sell a product. Try pushing this to any other website and it would crash for days.
This used to happen when sneaker reselling was at its peak. People would get angry at the terrible way Adidas or Nike would sell a sneaker, but when the same shoe was sold on a small website owned by some small store in Paris, the website would completely shut down until the owners could convince people via social media that the shoe will not be sold online, ever. Everyone loses. This problem was later solved by all stores either moving to Shopify, who has its own ticketmaster-like system, or just not selling popular sneakers online. Another thing that can happen is a seat could be sold to 100 people, then 99 get cancellations later. Would that make people happier?
Point 2: Bot protection. It's hard. I've worked on reseller/bot protection, you either go too light, and let bots in, or go too strong, and block non-bots. Especially when millions are hitting the website at once, and every seat can be sold once.
Point 3: It's not all professional resellers.
Someone can be a huge Swift fan, but if they see people spending thousands, or tens of thousands on StubHub, and it can pay for rent or half a new car, they'll sell it, even though they're not professional resellers. As long as Swift didn't block transferring tickets, and some rich people are willing to spend thousands, this will happen 100% of the time.
Ticketmaster, to try to fix this, has also attempted to sell the tickets themselves for resell prices, cutting out the middle man. But then people get mad at them. As long as the rich people are willing to pay, either Ticketmaster or resellers will charge them the high price
When you buy a ticket on stub hub, you see the buyers original name. Some times itll be some LLC, but most times its just some regular shmoe looking to make a buck
Are you looking to disrupt fees on a concert that never sold out? Sure, someone could do that, thats mostly politics internal to the entertainment world. Are you trying to sell out 20 stadiums at the same minute? It's either raffle, or queue, and not allowing anyone not on the paying credit card to enter concert
They are worth $16 billion (or about 1/4th an Elontwitter).
They had revenue of $6 billion and made a EBITDA of $573m.
So disruption of the Ticketmaster monopoly is going to result in $500 million? Perhaps?
They don't seem to be printing money as much as everything thinks they are. Someone could buy LYV and show people how you really milk a market to death.
Everyone makes more revenue when they go with TM - artists, venues, etc - everyone except for the ticket buyers, who pay out the nose. And TM plays the "bad guy" role in the equation to cover for all of those other people. Yes, TM holds a lot of contracts with venues, even owns some venues outright. But those contracts wouldn't exist if they weren't very juicy for the venue.
Every Phish tour starts the same way. Enter the lottery and hope to win tickets in some random spot.
Don't win lottery and join the Ticketmaster queue. Watch the site fall apart for an hour. Crashes at checkout and you're back to the end of the queue.
Go on Stubhub and pay 2x or more for the "big" shows (Halloween, NYE, etc).
But hey, also crashed chess.com.
They acquired the independent ticket sellers, then went on to acquire the physical venues themselves. Now if the artist wants to play at those venues, they deal with Ticketmaster from start to finish.
That means that even if artists wanted to buy a block of tickets to sell to their fans, their allotment would be whatever Ticketmaster themselves deem appropriate.
It's one of the most quietly intractable monopolies on the planet.
https://craphound.com/chokepoint/2022/09/27/twitch-does-a-ch...
Can you convince a small venue to use your new system? Maybe? But since the big venues use Ticketmaster, it's advantageous for the smaller venues to use the same thing.
Can you convince a big venue to use your new system? Absolutely not. You're some unproven little company.
Example: Broadway theaters. There are three organizations that collectively own the vast majority of the Broadway theaters, Shubert, Nederlander, and Jujamcyn. These are very wealthy and very old fashioned organizations. Even when it's time for them to renew their contracts, do you think you can convince any of them to leave Ticketmaster/Telecharge? Not a chance in hell.
Lastly, Ticketmaster already covers all of the use cases that these venues have. It doesn't do the best job, but it does the job. Even if you do a great job of covering 90% of the use cases, they won't switch to you if there's even one thing they need that your alternative can't handle. Even these small and rare edge cases are absolutely essential to their business. To even come close you will need to hire several experts in the ticketing industry to learn that business to even know what these cases are.
Ok, so let's say you hire ticketing experts and you build a system better than Ticketmaster that does indeed cover 100% of the use cases the venues have. And you have perfect timing, the venue's exclusive deal with Ticketmaster is coming to a close and you have the opportunity to sell to them. Can you do it? Can you convince them to take a huge risk to use your platform? What's the upside other than the fact that its nicer for ticket buyers? Sticking with Ticketmaster is a safe bet for them. If you fail to convince them in that one window, you won't be able to try to sell to that venue again for several years.
TL;DR: Ticketmaster's customers aren't the ticket buyers, it's the venue.
Source: I have worked in ticketing in the past.
Granted, it was challenging to build and operate tech to sell exactly 300 tickets for a venue like Webster Hall at a scheduled time to all of greater New York City area and the half of USA fans willing to travel for such an intimate concert.
But it's possible. Pearl Jam did the same back in the day.
Also AEG/AXS owns or has deals with some 30 venues in the US (not to mention London's O2) and also owns some sports teams.
They are such a powerful monopoly the average Joe rarely thinks there is an alternative.
It's difficult to do a TLDR for such a complex issue, but from what I remember the biggest problem seems to be that Ticketmaster is extremely vertical to the degree it either owns or has exclusive contracts with venues.
Seems like a pretty strong argument that they have a monopoly (so gov. regulation might be the only way to change anything).
If your band builds enough profile and sticks around long enough, you can always approach bars yourself that you have no history with, and we did actually do shows without the agency at a couple of places that we had never booked through them, it was fine, but involved a lot of hustle on the drummer's part as well. TANSTAAFL.
Now, I'm not actually comparing the above to Ticketmaster's shenanigans. For starters, there is a good argument for the role of the agency, in that every single gig we ever played, we got paid in full, on time, with zero hassle, and I boil that down to the implicit threat of losing access to the agency's bands. A similar dynamic guarantees to the venues that the bands they book will show up on time, play for the required amount of minutes, not be on bad drugs, etc.
Would I prefer that we had split up that extra two hun rather than hand it to those sharks? Sure, but I'm also a wimp and would not be able to do anything about it if some scumbag club owner told me, flanked by his bouncers, that it was a bad night and we can't get paid. It's far from perfect, but they're our sharks too.
But I bring up this very typical contract for a working band to say that it goes way way back through the centuries that the music business (not the industry - the business, as in the promoters, club owners, circus operators, Vaudeville stages, village Inns, etc) has spent literally centuries figuring out how to keep the talent from controlling anything. Opinions about this are fine, but it also means there's always been some reliable work for talented people who just want to provide a service for folks who want to do something involving music, rather than Be An Artist or whatever.
But Ticketmaster, and later the streaming platforms, really amped up that process of predatory contracts to levels previously unseen. I have always been a bit cynical when "artist" type musicians, people who exclusively play their own compositions I mean, complain about their lack of ability to make a living at that; I have a lot more concern about the ability of music teachers and wedding/event/bar bands to make a living with their craft, because they are the ones I consider to be "working" musicians, but even stipulating that, things have clearly turned into a free for all at this point.
We do actually need artists, as annoying as they can get.
Because speculation is at the core of capitalism.