Ticketmaster has exclusive contracts with venues and usually owns the venues outright, so it doesn't matter where the money goes, it's all back into their coffers.
LOL:
"Competition in the live entertainment industry is intense. We believe that we compete primarily on the basis of our ability to deliver quality music products, sell tickets and provide enhanced fan and artist experiences. We believe that our primary strengths include:
TicketMaster's big advantage is that competition between venues isn't intense. Smaller cities will generally only have 1-2 venues of a decently large size, especially if you require things like alcohol licenses and permission to stay open late at night.
In any market where opening a new competitor was easy, someone would be fighting TicketMaster on prices and services. But since they deal in heavy venue lock-in, and opening new venues is essentially impossible (hi there, zoning laws), they get to gouge basically everyone involved.
Hmmm, do you know of a larger small venue group that is owned by a single entity? (or more specially not owned by Live Nation and requires TicketMaster tickets)
"Biggest" and "conglomerate" make it sound like something that it is not. There may not be larger small venue groups but if someone told me that there was a large "conglomerate" operating in the small venue space I'd assume it was more than 10 venues.
http://www.livenationentertainment.com