– What benefit does a venue have signing a contract with Ticketmaster? There are plenty of other ticket providers in the space, do they undercut processing fees and offload them to consumers? What else?

Question

I know they own a bunch of the venues they have contracts with but outside of that, why wouldn’t they go with another ticketing provider?

In: 1

Answer 1

At first it was convenient – Ticketmaster provided a simple and practical ticketing platform, and had much more favourable terms, so it was beneficial for venues to use their system.

The more venues and artists that used them and the greater the market share they earned, the more practical it became to use them – the ability to book a whole tour through one ticketing portal rather than using a different local system for every night of a tour was a great advantage logistically, so it benefitted everyone when venues were able to provide the same systems artists wanted to use.

Then they hit critical mass, and were used so regularly that not using Ticketmaster became more difficult, so even the artists and venues who want to stay independent end up forced into it for practicality.

Once everyone has locked themselves in and has no alternative, Ticketmaster were free to start abusing this to their advantage by raising prices, adding fees, and being able to control the availability of tickets to their own benefit.

Alongside this they also did things like joining forces with companies like live nation who owned venues to create an effective monopoly – if live nation own the majority (or all) of the relevant sized venues in a town, touring bands are left with a choice between using their system, or not playing in that town at all…