

Why I Hate Buying Tickets - nickpersico
http://blog.nickpersico.com/post/29781168645/why-i-hate-buying-tickets

======
jack7890
I run a ticket startup (SeatGeek) and thus have some familiarity with the
industry. In response to to the proposed solutions:

 _"Someone Needs To Create A New Ticketing Platform"_

Creating it is one thing. Getting venues to agree to use it is much, much
harder. Venues usually sign long-term (5-10 year) contracts with Ticketmaster
to make them their exclusive ticket platform. These contracts usually include
a large upfront payment from Ticktmaster to the venue. Given that LiveNation
is the by far the biggest promoter in the US, it would be an enormous risk for
a venue to forsake Ticketmaster and go with an alternative.

 _"Venues/Artists Need To Ditch The Big Guys"_

See the above. Pearl Jam rather famously tried this in the mid-1990's, with
disastrous results (<http://goo.gl/xJItB>). Not playing in Ticketmaster venues
forced them into the netherlands of American live music venues.

 _"All-Inclusive Pricing Model"_

To Ticketmaster's credit, they're getting a lot better at this, but they still
have a way to go. It's worth noting that the majority of the fees that the
author complains about are not kept by Ticketmaster; they are kicked back to
the event promoter. The promoter does this so that they can advertise low face
values (appearing fan-friendly) while maintaining margins.

 _"Offer More Music/Merchandise + Ticket Packages"_

This is a bit of a non-sequitur. The author writes the entire article from the
perspective of making ticket buying better, and then throws this in "for the
content creators." It will indeed make more money for artists, assuming it
doesn't hurt conversion rate (which it does) but strong-arming consumers into
buying more stuff when they purchase tickets doesn't seem fan-friendly to me.

 _"Forget Everything I Just Wrote, We Should All Learn From Louis C.K."_

Totally impractical. Louis C.K. could pull this off because he performs at
comedy clubs. If you're Coldplay...not an option (see above).

There's no question that ticketing needs reformation. But this is an industry
(like payment processing) where considering change from a detached, naive
perspective is fruitless. It's important to understand the intricacies before
avenues for upheaval can be found.

~~~
latchkey
I currently run a online ticketing startup (Voost) for another side industry,
athletic events (think bike/running/triathlete races), but I've also owned a
fairly large night club in San Francisco. I've had the fortune of seeing a few
sides of this industry now.

You have a great explanation. I think the key point is getting venues to agree
to switch to something else because Ticketmaster/ClearChannel truly owns the
market. Heck, they own most of the venues too. One time, I ended up losing a
ton of money on a Bone Thugs & Harmony show because a ClearChannel radio
station advertised 'accidentally' that we were sold out and tickets wouldn't
be available at the door. Nobody showed up. The games they can play are
amazingly creative.

This time around for Voost, we are trying to buck the trend with ticket sales.
We force the promoters to always absorb the ticket fees themselves. The
athletes love it because it is one simple price and we've done our best to
keep our fees at a minimum. We'll see how it works out in the long run for us,
but so far it's been good.

Sure, you can make the tickets $1 and charge a $50 fee (which gets kicked
back), but eventually people are going to catch on and start complaining.

For venue ticketing, I honestly can't fathom someone in a startup really
upsetting the industry without playing the same games as ticket master.

~~~
gbog
> a ClearChannel radio station advertised 'accidentally' that we were sold out
> and tickets wouldn't be available at the door. Nobody showed up.

Didn't you sue them? I hear all the time that US is a country dominates by its
lawyers, and that you can sue you physician if he didn't forecast your cancer
ten years in advance. Here you seem to have a legitimate case, and would win
some money they would find a less disgusting way to fight next time. Or maybe,
or surely I'm wrong and laws don't protect people and businesses in US the
same way they do in Europe.

~~~
latchkey
No, of course I didn't sue them and they knew I wasn't going to sue. It isn't
like there is even a phone number or person that you can call to complain. And
really, what would I sue for exactly? How could I prove they did that on
purpose?

I'm also not JWZ (even though my club was on the same street as his). I didn't
have endless gobs of Netscape money to sink into dealing with stuff like
that... and that is a big reason why my business died. This is just one story
of _many_ issues we faced.

Lesson learned: never open a night club despite how good your intentions are.

~~~
gbog
> How could I prove they did that on purpose?

You shouldn't need to.

If their mistake did cause harm to your business, they should pay for it.
Having more or less money than the other part should have zero correlation
with the result of a justice judgement, because having more or less money do
not change the facts that have happened and should be judged.

At least that's how we conceive justice in France (eg "dommages et intérêts"),
but after reading the US-DE comparison [1] I understand I am probably wrong.

\- [1] <http://math-www.uni-paderborn.de/~axel/us-d.html>

------
brackin
Sadly there's very little space for startups to fix this. Live Nation/Ticket
Master have a monopoly. I'm not sure how on earth they were allowed to merge.
It's like merging all of the record labels with Apple/iTunes.

Yes, you can buy tickets on other sites but there's very little space for
innovation and they hold the key, if they don't want you to do something
innovative they can stop you and if you do succeed you're still funding your
competitor.

~~~
austenallred
I think you're slightly mistaken there. The merger that created this monopoly
was TicketMaster and TicketsNow. TicketsNow was one of the largest names in
the secondary market (what most people will commonly refer to as brokers and
scalpers), where TicketMaster and LiveNation were both primary ticketing
suppliers. The National Association of Ticket Brokers have been lobbying
against this as a vertical monopoly, and have shown significant evidence that
TicketMaster, when under contract to sell tickets at a certain price, will
sell first to TicketsNow and then sell them at the market value on TicketsNow.
They've lost a lot of money in law suits as a result and will continue to do
so.

TicketMaster and LiveNation did merge in 2010, but that would be more like
Apple and Google merging than Apple and iTunes.

~~~
brucehart
I was under the impression that TicketsNow had very little market share.
Aren't (EBay owned) StubHub, EBay and Craigslist the major players in the
secondary market (excluding scalpers at the event)?

I have college basketball season tickets and my online account is integrated
with TicketsNow (one click to electronically list my tickets to any game).
I've tried using it as a seller and have had no interest in my tickets. The
same tickets usually sell within a few days on StubHub.

As a buyer, I have checked TicketsNow on occasion and rarely find any tickets
available for the event. One time I did find a great deal: 5th row center
court tickets to a sold out game at face value. I think I got them because no
other buyers had looked on the site.

~~~
austenallred
It depends on if you're a consumer or a broker. If you're a consumer, sure,
StubHub and CL will probably do the best for you, but that's because you're
not a broker.

I'll definitely make some brokers angry by explaining this, but there are a
few ticketing networks, the largest being TicketNetwork (TN).

TN is a SaaS play that costs somewhere in the $2500/year range, and goes up or
down depending on which services you need. If I'm a broker I can simply get on
TicketNetwork and list my tickets. We'll say I bought a ticket for $50 and I
want to sell it for $100. I put it on the network at $100. TicketNetwork
automatically updates it so that it's selling on your site for $100. Since
it's on the network every other ticket broker has access to it, and they
resell it for different amounts (standard is your price + 20%). So another
ticket broker in my city would try to sell the ticket for $120 - they pay me
$100, and I dropship it directly to the customer with a white-label packing
slip.

There are about 800 brokers on the network at any given time and about $1
Billion in inventory. Some won't sell, most will. The affiliate payout in the
ticket industry is among the highest, since it's super high margins. As a
broker it's great, because as soon as you throw a ticket on the network you
have 800 people trying to sell your ticket. But not just anyone can be on the
Network - you have to pay a pretty penny for that opportunity, that keeps
people like you out.

Where TicketsNow makes most of its money is in the selling. They have
excellent marketing, great affiliates, and they are selling an absurd amount
of tickets. They let you post your tickets on TicketsNow, but that's not where
the real money is made, the real money is in selling other brokers' tickets
that are much higher margins.

------
paulsutter
Maybe the way to change the model is to start with small bands/shows/venues.
Get the model working well for them, and gradually work they way up.

Spotify and Pandora know what obscure bands are popular near every small
venue. Booking managers should have access to this data to decide what bands
to book. Once they've booked a show, they should be able to promote the shows
back to the exact Pandora or Spotify users that like the bands, perhaps using
realtime bidding on an ad exchange (since users are rarely watching the
Pandora or Spotify pages).

I listen a hundred plus bands via streaming. I dont even know their names,
much less when they play nearby. A system like this could increase the number
of small shows, and make it possible for more musicians to make a living as
musicains.

Start with the little guys first, eventually you can work your way up to
dethrone Ticketmaster.

------
zbowling
The dirty secret is that many of these "fees" are actually from the venues and
performers. TicketMaster and others are actually taking the heat as the bad
guys on behalf of the venues and performers. We hate on TicketMaster and we
can put the blame all on them (and the artists and venues sometimes even guide
us to do so).

But if it's so bad then why do they keep using TicketMaster? Surely I'm not
buying a ticket to a performance only because I can find it on the
TicketMaster web page or box office right? They don't really offer anything
substantial over the buying experience I can get anywhere else so the monopoly
argument is silly (although they do have a good patent portfolio it's not
anything can't innovate around).

It's simply because they will take the heat for them when the artists and
venues want to tack on extra fees. That is not say TicketMaster's fees are not
high but most of the "extra fees" are extras from the venues and performers.

The same goes with Fandango. You think that extra $1 for buying a ticket
online Fandangos fee?? Nope. It's the fee for the movie theatre wants.

I've worked in this ticketing industry in a previous startup so I understand
the game well. It's not really crazy the stuff that gets pulled.

~~~
rhizome
So you're saying that maybe a law could be passed to identify these kickbacks.
Think of an ingredients list on food packaging, where all portions of the fee
are accounted for up front.

~~~
zbowling
Well the fees are actually not really "kickbacks" but really just normal fees
with standard crazy markups that are vague on who actually gets the money.
They aren't required to list out who makes what money on things. They are just
not allowed to lie and commit fraud and they do make sure to stay inside those
bounds.

"General processing fee" is really just a processing fee as it sounds (but it
doesn't say who gets the money, why does that mater? they are not committing
fraud by claiming something it isn't).

They have a right to tack on any fees they want and you have the right not to
buy it. They could put a fee on there at checkout for making a purchase on a
full moon. Whatever, it doesn't mater. Now if they are charging you for fees
after you make the purchase of a product or service, you do have some consumer
protections but not when they are tacking them on up front.

You are buying a ticket and how the money is used isn't really something that
isn't provided. Your only real right as a consumer is to buy or not buy. If
you want more info about how money is spent and they won't provide it you have
the right to not buy it but you can't force private businesses to be publicly
audited.

~~~
mthoms
>Well the fees are actually not really "kickbacks" but really just normal fees

They aren't normal though. Air fares exempted, I can't think of many goods and
service that have so many extra fees tacked on to the advertised price.

It's also not "normal" to charge a customer _more_ when they are in fact
costing you less (ie. print at home tickets). This may be legal and permitted
but it sure as heck isn't "normal" or ethical business practice.

>Your only real right as a consumer is to buy or not buy.

I think most here would agreed it should be your right as a consumer to know
the _real_ price upfront. Not much to ask.

~~~
dantheman
What other service do you buy tickets for?

~~~
mthoms
Travel and events are the major ones. Why do you ask?

------
kenjackson
I'm in the US but I recently bought tickets via Ticketmaster to a show in
Canada. I was going to order parking too, but they wanted to charge $30 to
ship the parking passes. One sheet of paper to ship 200 miles, cost $30? And
no option to print it out. Feels like it should be illegal.

~~~
nickpersico
Agreed.

------
hncommenter13
There is lots of useful and interesting detail about how the ticketing
industry works in this thread, and I certainly sympathize with the post's
complaint. But I'd like to briefly (and mildly) chastise the idea for a more
abstract reason, if you'll indulge me.

The post advocates starting a company in order to build and sell a new
software application. If this resembles every other business app I've ever
written or used, the developer will quickly run into a complex set of rules
and requirements that is almost impossible to fully anticipate or characterize
a priori.

The motivation for doing so is admittedly egregious fees charged by an
incumbent vendor. Imagine one is successful in building the app, despite all
of the unforeseeable obstacles. All the incumbent would have to do is lower
its prices, either accepting slightly lower margins to maintain the fee pass-
thru to its partners or eliminating such fees as the hypothetical startup
would do.

In other words, the proposal is to dedicate years of effort to a problem in
order to compete on price by 10-25%. This is generally a losing proposition.
If one can achieve a 90% lower price for the same or slightly better
functionality that an incumbent will find difficult to match (the famed 10x
price/performance improvement), then one may have something sufficient to
build a business around, depending on how difficult/capital intensive it is to
create the product--ignoring all of the other barriers to adoption that exist
in this or another industry.

But faced with a narrow price-performance improvement, incumbents can either
lower prices or, if it's a functional improvement, invest a similar or lesser
amount of capital (they already have employees, a brand name, a salesforce,
etc. that a startup would have to build from scratch) to match to the feature
set.

Don't get me wrong: I don't want to talk anyone out of the desire to start a
company, to improve a process or an application, or to return excess profits
to the consumer in the form of lower prices. But part of being a successful
entrepreneur is picking the right battles and bringing an unfair advantage to
bear against tough competition, something I and many others still struggle to
achieve. In this case, I don't see the unfair advantage or the 10x
improvement, and I think we should challenge each other to be hard-nosed
realists about where we focus our collective entrepreneurial talents.

~~~
wpietri
Excellent analysis. But I think you've missed an important point.
Unfortunately, the real customers in this market aren't the people buying the
tickets, because they aren't the ones deciding whether or not Ticketmaster
gets the gig. Ticket-buyers are the veal.

If you want to displace Ticketmaster, you need to find something that's 10x
better for the _venue_ , not the buyer. Or you need to find a way to disrupt
the venue/artist relationship sufficiently that the venue's choices don't
matter.

------
mjw
You probably guessed this but: promoters often have deals whereby they get a
cut of the ticketing agency fees, say in exchange for exclusivity. So really
the distinction presented to the consumer between fees and the face price of
the ticket is all a bit bogus.

And that's before you look into the sort of practices around tickets being
released by the agency to a secondary ticket vendor (perhaps one which they
own...) and sold on at great markup with a cut going back to the agency and
perhaps even back to the promoter.

I suspect the problem is that while the author is happy to pay $60 all-
inclusive with no questions asked, a lot of live music fans are young-ish and
on the kind of budget where it isn't an easy decision to spend $60 on a
night's entertainment. You might persuade them to pay, but harder if you put
them off with a big upfront ticket price than if you spring it on them in
hidden extras. I'm sure ticketmaster have done their research and wouldn't be
doing it this way if it didn't increase their revenue, and that promoters
wouldn't be using them if these tactics didn't improve theirs.

Also part of the problem is that there's this social pressure in the music
industry around fans and ticket pricing and around artists 'selling out'. In
the open market, tickets for big shows are usually worth a lot more than the
face price, but promoters (or at least, artists) are reluctant to _be seen to_
capture all that value because of the negative PR involved.

A lot of people have wanted to see Ticketmaster taken down a peg for a long
time. It's probably easier to do if you limit yourself to small-to-mid-size
gigs, independent artists etc, and there are already some great non-abusive
ticketing agencies in this space for example <http://www.wegottickets.com> ...

------
cdcarter
The problem has so many facets it's hard to count. Where to start?

a) charging by subscription instead of by transaction. This is nice. This is a
great idea for patron happiness. Unfortunately the patron isn't the customer
at a ticketing agent. The customer is the presenter/promoter or venue. As a
patron, I don't NOT buy Japandroids tickets because TicketMaster is the
ticketing agent. This plan causes the ticketing agency to almost assuredly
lose money or customers (price too low they lose money, price too high they
lose smaller venues).

b) The "big guys" are also probably that artist's promoter, or they own the
venue. LN/TM promote most big names and own a good portion of the venues. It's
vertical.

c) No band wants their promoter or agent to deal with merch. Merch is where a
lot of the money comes in at the venue, and they want as much control of that
as possible. Most venues already require a certain percentage of merch sales
be given back in settlement. The only way to make this work would be for the
label or artist to sell the merch package ahead of time with a voucher for
tickets to be used at the agent.

It doesn't help that ticketing a very large likely to sell out show is HARD.
It doesn't help that convenience charges are accepted in the industry and
quite frankly, if you're a venue that runs a hard box office with an online
agent, you love that they charge a convenience fee.

The only real solution without major disruption by a major act leaving the
LN/TM world is for TM to show final price, and have all the settlement be
secret. I honestly would prefer to see the fees as they break down, so I know
how much is going to the box office settlement.

~~~
cdcarter
I think the place for a great disruptive startup would be at the promoter
level. It's not something that you can just throw a lot of tech at, but at
this point LN seems a lot more disruptable than TM.

------
droithomme
I read the article. Here is my summary:

"Blah blah blah, and then I bought the tickets because the price was worth it
to me."

Well OK then. That means they are pricing things correctly.

Should, someday, these stories ever change to "Blah blah blah, and then I
cancelled the order and did something else with my time that day because the
cost was not acceptable to me", then perhaps something would change if enough
people actually did this. But as long as there are sold out shows, prices, and
even fees, should be increased, not decreased. Sold out shows means you are
not charging enough.

------
crazygringo
The U.S. passed a law saying that displayed airline tickets on sites
(expedia.com, etc.) have to include all fees.

That was a great thing, because suddenly you could accurately compare between
sites that included and didn't include the fees up-front.

Seems to me that ticket purchases would be another _great_ area to pass a law
saying advertised prices must reflect all fees. It won't stop them from
charging them, but at least they'll "feel" built-in, rather than feeling like
a bait-and-switch.

Heck, _no_ companies should be allowed to display prices that don't include
minimum mandatory fees. (Except for sales tax, since people expect that.) It's
kind of ridiculous they can get away with it in the first place.

~~~
cdcarter
The fees are only levied online, not at the hard box office. So the promoter
can advertise the ticket price, and the ticketing agent adds fees.

------
Wingman4l7
Wired had a good piece about companies going after Ticketmaster, back in
November 2010: <http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/11/mf_ticketmaster/>

------
pud
> 23.8% Of My Ticket Price Were Charges & Fees

23.8% of the cost of your Big Mac is also charges and fees.

The fact is, people don't like transparency when it comes to pricing. You'd
rather not know how much the wholesale price is when paying retail.

I believe artists & venues force TicketMaster to show you the wholesale price.
TicketMaster would likely prefer you didn't know their profit margin, like
almost every other company you buy things from.

~~~
rwallace
It's not the transparency that annoyed him, it's the slow reveal. If the site
announced upfront that the total price is $60, and provided a footnote with a
breakdown of where the money goes, that would be fine.

General rule, don't tell customers "oh by the way the price will be twenty
percent higher than we said it would be." If you're going to piss people off,
do it for more money than that.

~~~
nickpersico
Exactly. When I go buy my Big Mac, at least I know it's going to be that final
price + state sales tax. The intention of my post was not the price, but how
the price was conveyed.

Does Ticketmaster know what percentage of people click "Buy Tickets" and leave
during their three steps of fees:

1\. Convenience Charge 2\. Delivery Charge 3\. Processing Charge

What would the percentages be if there was just:

1\. Total Charge

As a consumer, I am deciding if the total price is worth seeing the content I
want to consume. In Ticketmaster's current checkout process, they give me
three opportunities to change my mind.

------
guelo
Ticketmaster and Comcast alternate as the #1 and #2 most hated companies in
consumer surveys year after year. But it doesn't seem to matter, their
monopolies have been stable for many years. I thought maybe the acquisition by
Live Nation would help with Ticketmaster abuses but there haven't been many
changes. Unless the government steps in it looks like this will be the state
of affairs for a long time.

------
ams6110
I for one don't begrudge these fees at all. What's the alternative? Go down to
the venue (driving, parking) and stand in line at the box office? My time is
worth something.... I think these fees are more than fair. It's not really
about what it costs TicketMaster to do this stuff, it's about what it's worth
to the buyer.

~~~
dagw
It's not so much the fees, but the way the pricing information is presented
that piss people off. If you went to the ticketing site, got told that tickets
where $60 each, bought 4 tickets and got charged $240 I doubt most people
would complain. But if you're told tickets are $45 each and then all of a
sudden get charged $240 for 4 tickets that's when people get annoyed.

------
dooq
Brown Paper Tickets is excellent up-and-coming ticketing company that I've
used multiple times for alternative events in the pacific northwest. I'd love
to see more companies take on the ticketmaster empire.
<https://www.brownpapertickets.com>

~~~
omrim
I'm in the PNW as well, but not too fond of Brown Paper Tickets.

One company that I believed in was Bookr - they took away the ticketing fees
(well actually they bundled it into a final price... so it was 'hidden'). They
were working with local venues to give customers a clear price for the tickets
they paid for.

Unfortunately Bookr didn't make it :(

------
nickpersico
Thanks for the great insight guys! Are the promoters/venues adding these fees
because their Ticketmaster contract forces them to do it? Or are they doing it
because the industry allows them to do so. What's their opinion towards it?

