Posted by William Fowler on Oct 23, 2013 | Tags: LiveNation , Ticketmaster | 2135 0 comments http%3A

Posted by William Fowler on Oct 23, 2013 | Tags: LiveNation , Ticketmaster | 2135 0 comments http%3A%2F%2Fwww.onlineeconomy.org%2Fhow-does-ticketmaster-still-exist apple vacation packages How+Does+Ticketmaster+Still+Exist%3F 2013-10-23+19%3A44%3A13 William+Fowler http%3A%2F%2Fwww.onlineeconomy.org%2F%3Fp%3D2135
Want to see the Patriots apple vacation packages beat Buffalo in December? Tickets to the game are only $75. But if you actually apple vacation packages want to buy tickets, you'll spend at least $88. Too steep? How about we get in the Christmas Spirit at a Trans-Siberian Orchestra concert for a more reasonable $30, instead? apple vacation packages Wrong again: this time, those $30 tickets actually cost at least $52. How is this possible? Surely 73% tax is excessive, even in Massachusetts.
The main culprit, of course, is Ticketmaster surcharges. Whether they are facility apple vacation packages fees, service fees, or order processing fees, Ticketmaster add-ons make even airline pricing look simple. Consumers despise these fees, and there's been no shortage of public complaints from performers, either. So how on earth can a platform endure in this startup-crazed information age when both sides of its market hate it?
A quick history apple vacation packages of Ticketmaster might help explain why the company hasn't followed Blockbuster and Circuit City into obsolescence. In 1982, Ticketmaster was itself a spunky startup challenging the dominant player at the time, Ticketron. Ticketron's business model was simple: they centralized all ticket sales for venues across the country, and venues paid Ticketron a commission of $1 per ticket sold. Ticketmaster approached the largest halls and arenas with a radically different offer: in exchange for exclusive sales contracts, Ticketmaster would instead pay the venues a portion of service fees the service imposed on consumers. By 1991, Ticketron was gone and Ticketmaster was the undisputed king of ticket sales. Turns out that the event market isn't really between fans and performers, it's between fans and venues.
However, Ticketmaster is still just an aggregating and distributing middle-man, and travel agents will tell you that the Internet makes life tough for middle-men. Couldn't venues just make their open seats available through an XML feed and let a myriad apple vacation packages of ticket-selling online startups compete to sell them, kayak.com style? Then the venues wouldn't have to split the service fee with Ticketmaster and they could retain all that value for themselves. Services like Veritix , In Ticketing , Ticketfly , tiktz.com , Eventbrite , Tix , Classictic , and even HBS-favorite WePay offer variations on that theme, and bloggers have been predicting the imminent end of Ticketmaster for years.
Not so fast. In 2010, concert promoter Live Nation merged with Ticketmaster to form a colossus that sells over 140 million tickets to 22,000 concerts each year. The new company also owns 140 concert venues that now have no motivation to build their own seat-selling interface. The Justice apple vacation packages Department required Ticketmaster to license some of its software to competitors, but allowed many long-term exclusive contracts with venues to stand after the merger. Again, it's all about the venues.
On the surface, there seem to be whiffs of anti-competitive or monopolistic behavior here. But taking a step back, maybe what consumers and fans really hate is not the Ticketmaster fees and surcharges. Maybe they actually hate knowing that they're paying fees and surcharges. After all, how many of us know how much an author makes when we buy a book from Amazon? apple vacation packages Or who knows what commission that nice saleslady made off us? We just assume that portions of our payment go to the various market players who participated in delivering apple vacation packages the good or service we just purchased, apple vacation packages and probably also that every participant thinks they deserve a bigger share than they actually apple vacation packages received.
With this in mind, I suggest that Ticketmaster is actually being too transparent for its own good. Knowing that 40% of my Trans-Siberian Orchestra expense is paying for me to get tickets by email makes me think that both me and my beloved neo-classical rock band are being ripped off. But if I only know that I'm paying $52 for a concert ticket, I'll just pause for a moment to think that those tickets are a little pricier than I was expecting. Then I'll blithely click "confirm purchase."