Justice Department sues Ticketmaster and owner Live Nation, alleging illegal monopoly
 

Thanks, Taylor!

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">BREAKING: Justice Department sues Ticketmaster and owner Live Nation, alleging an illegal monopoly over live events in the U.S. <a href="https://t.co/yMlRYo0WqR">https://t.co/yMlRYo0WqR</a></p>&mdash; The Associated Press (@AP) <a href="https://twitter.com/AP/status/1793651566764859558?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">May 23, 2024</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

Fees are ridiculous on tickets.

They are. We have allowed all these huge conglomerates to merge. Its just not to our benefit to only have 3 companies providing 80% of our food. We only have 1 company that builds airplanes for the military and civilian here in the USA. Only 1 company in the USA that builds semi-conductor's that run pretty much everything we use daily..

Tickets would be cheaper to live events if they were broke up along with the others. It cost $150 to go see anyone these days. When we use to see those acts for 1/2- 1/3 of that cost for the same show.

Ticketmaster and Live nation are paying way above market vaule for exclusive rights to an arena. They then not only pass that money onto us but it keeps another promoter from trying to provide a better product to us in that venue.

Excellent. Ticketmaster can suck hobo dick in hell.

Remember when you just called the arena to buy tickets the morning they went on sale? When did it all change??

Hell yes, about time.

This will have the most bipartisan support the country has seen in years.

When we allowed Ticketmaster and Live Nation to gobble up competitors and share a monopoly.

Companies don't pass the savings from the mergers on to us, just to their stock shareholders. Which is perfectly fine and long as it doesn't create a monopoly. That's when it ends us costing us ticket buyers more money for the same product.

The FTC and DOJ sue about 10 companies a week.

Legal extortion in many cases, valid in few.

Swifties are more powerful than any other fanbase on earth

Remember that when some of you plebs slander her name

I probably had 10 or 15 of their dumb vouchers expire a couple years after the last settlement.

"Sorry we gouged you on fees for years. We're going to keep doing that because **** you we just spent a bunch of money on legal fees ourselves, but here's $2.50 off your next 20 concerts. Only one is valid per concert and you can't use them for anything popular, so just other stuff you wouldn't go to anyway. And you have two years to use them all. It's literally the least we could do, **** you."


Dicks.

Some of you are really silly.

If I offer you tickets at $500 no fees or $400 with $200 of fees, which do you want?

Try buying tickets on Craigslist without getting ****ed or scammed.

I'm no fan of monopolies but lets be real, tickets for all events are ridiculous and the fees are just salt in the wound, not the root cause of the bigger problem.

The athletes and entertainers are being paid crazy sums.

LOL....I remember that.

So thoughtful!

Word.

Between the fees and the ticket costs themselves, I've pretty much been priced out of live events. They're simply not worth the cost of admission, no matter what the performance is.

So some of you now want our government to start regulating fees on tickets to sporting and music events?

Good lord that is insane.

I want government to step in when the situation is unfair and the practices of Live Nation are unfair and not in good faith.

So, yeah.

Good. ****ing dick holes

Are you trying to be dense, good lord.

Maybe take an Econ 101 class. This has nothing to do with the secondary market or government regulating fees.

The only difference between your posts and farts is that farts don't stink all the time.

Are you being forced to buy tickets?

Is anyone?

Are sports and music events mandatory and you HAVE to attend?

It's everyone's right to decide if they want to attend or not and spend the price.

None of the governments business.

Complete overreach

FFS man, do you not understand supply/demand and how a monopoly can operate outside the free market controls for costs of goods? It seems that you are not only a dipshit when it comes to phone icons but also economics.

So the ONLY company selling tickets is Ticketmaster/Live Nation?

Another know-it-all blowhard.

There are antitrust laws, The Sherman Antitrust Act... it's literally their business and has been for over 100 years.

Yeah I took my buddy to the home opener last year. I had to go to see the banner drop. The tickets were so goddamn expensive. I think it was like $1500 just to sit in the lower 3 rows of the upper deck. I'll never do that again.

Which sucks. I'd pay $350 easy to do it this year again. But at the current prices, it goes down as "life experience," not "weekend entertainment."

Yes, in many cases.


That, or secondary market companies like stubhub and seatgeek which do the same thing after mass purchase of tickets as soon as they go on sale.

Do you know what monopoly means? Not the game, the noun.

Yeah, I pretty much have to ignore the final price of events I really want to attend after all the fees and bullshit or else I'd never attend anything... and there are still plenty of fairly priced concerts out there before fees, it just sucks when that $40 ticket becomes $120 for a pair after fees.

There's definitely a tug of war in my mind between "**** TicketMaster" and allowing them to dictate never seeing a decently priced show (or a not so decently priced sporting event) live again.

Hell, just take away the double dipping of 20% secondary market fees and that would be a huge step forward.

In a lot of cases they are the only option, you fat dumbass. Companies like Stubhub and Seatgeek are secondary sales so you have the additional markup after they have purchased tickets from Ticketmaster.

In a capitalist society, two things happen:
1. Many competitors should get in the market with better pricing/lower fees.
2. People finally have enough and stop going.

I love it that people will spend $500 a night for a hotel to just sleep while on vacation with stupid resort fees or $75,000 for a new car with dealer fees now over $1,000 in some cases or pay a realtor in the past $50,000 ****ing dollars to sell a house.

These are all choices.......

Different for a single utility company that has an absolute monopoly.

Go **** yourself blowhard.

NO ONE IS FORCED TO BUY TICKETS.

And Stubhub used to be amazing until they went the same route of 20-25% fees several years ago, probably colluding with TM's reselling of tickets.

Yet another thread where it's 20 other people who are the problem. :facepalm:

I don't want government to regulate concert ticket prices, I want government to bust up monopolies like they should be busted up. There's a HUGE difference, there.

Who knew we had Milton Friedman in our midst? Please continue to educate us good sir!

Can we also crack down on bots that purchase tickets during the first 10 minutes of the sale and then sell them afterwards at jacked up prices?

Seconded

It is impossible for anyone to be this stupid. One of the skanky meth head hooker must have ****ed your brains out.

What about Facebook?
What about Google Search?
What about Kellogg and Proctor & Gamble?
What about InBev and Diageo?

First time the Biden justice dept. has actually done something right.

:thumb:

Those are different. They do the Fed's bidding.

Facebook and Google search are free to use.

Another stupid comment.

Hooker, hooker, hooker, hooker, hooker, hooker, hooker, hooker, hooker, hooker, hooker, hooker, hooker, hooker, hooker, hooker, hooker, hooker, hooker, hooker, hooker, hooker, hooker, hooker, hooker, hooker, hooker.

The ability of some of you to actually engage in an intelligent conversation and not resort to the same ol stupid shit comment with insults thinking you are always the smartest person in the room is hilarious.

Yeah.

Yes, this is no different than a network buying exclusive rights to entertainment and then charging for you to watch it on Peacock, Prime or Netflix.

They will just do away with the fees and charge more for tix.

Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, etc...
Bing, duck duck go
General Mills, Tyson, Nestle...
Unilever, Johnson and Johnson, Henkel
Pabst, Heineken, Molson Coors

This is why you are not too smart.

What about advertising costs?

:facepalm: JFC man

I wouldn't have guessed I would get the "Defender of Ticketmaster" square on my 2024 Bingo card.

You were saying.

Add them to the list?

The biggest problem is ticket scalping


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Sort of, they haven't started jacking up costs by much (yet) just for that one football game or whatever... and TicketMaster double dips with reselling tickets and you have all the issues with scalpers and what not.

And the networks are at least competing for those events, while the issue here is the steps TicketMaster has taken to monopolize arenas and force shows to only deal with them.

Schmo will need to spend extra money to buy influence, respect, and friends on this forum after his dumb ****ing take and subsequent doubling down on said take.

Dumb, old, fat, unlikeable ****.

What about them? Products and services can be advertised almost anywhere. TV, radio, billboards, the sides of buses, you name it.

Omg.
I can get you in.

Thinking about this more, I'd say it's closer to Sunday NFL Ticket.

DirecTV back in the day could jack up the price because it was exclusive and they could even jack up their normal monthly fees because **** you.

Where as if Prime suddenly wanted to charge $100 for a single playoff game, it would be so far out of whack, the NFL would probably have major concerns about ratings and would go with the cheaper option for fans (for their own ratings of course, not because they give a shit about fans). At least that competition exists for some consumer benefit in the end.

Don't be sad because you ain't worth shit and I wouldn't even piss on you if you were on fire.

Yeah, you're right, I have no friends......ROFL

TicketMaster IS a scam, but do we really wanna involve the govt. in this? Let's think about that for a second.

TicketMaster has the right to charge whatever ridiculous fees they want to and you as the consumer have the right to tell them to '**** off' and not purchase from them. :shrug:

Meh, this is actually something the government should be doing, breaking up abusive monopolies that actually harm consumers and businesses.

They have the right but they also produce the shows.

So they have the contact with the artist and then they say you can only buy from us and then they say it costs extra money for that right.

I'm not being forced to buy tickets but when I buy tickets I am forced to deal with that entity, That's the problem and the whole point of the Sherman antitrust act.

I call bullshit

Think of the price gouging as nothing more than an unfortunate outcome to their shitty monopoly ways... theoretically, the government isn't coming in to say they can only charge $x or whatever.

They're coming in to fix the issues where they've forced everyone in multiple industries to deal with them and them only, where the path to entering the market as a ticket seller doesn't even exist, and probably other issues that gouge not just consumers, but artists, leagues, arenas/stadiums... everyone.

The government is (supposed to be) making the monopoly go away based on laws that have been on the books for 150 years.... the pricing will either fix itself in a fair market or it won't, but sure as hell would be nice.

To be fair Ticketmaster screwed around with the wrong consumers here. You don't cross the Swifties. Those consumers are about to tell them where to stick it and they may be about to pay for it.

Everyone's talking about the prices but the real kicker with this will be about whether their ticket selling practices get dragged out into the light. It's not just about ticket prices. It's not really a secret that Ticketmaster turns a blind eye to scalpers and bots because Ticketmaster owns the resale market now. They can sell tickets like Taylor Swift's to scalpers, make money on all these "fees" for the initial sale then the scalper turns around and sells the ticket for a big profit and Ticketmaster makes even more on the "fees" for that purchase as well.

This has been a thing for years, in fact there's some belief Ticketmaster encourages it, it's just nobody has ever wanted to touch it: https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/tic...egas-1.4828535

So in 2010 the government allowed them to merge and now the government is saying "do-over, we ****ed up."

This is why I hate government.

That is a complete misunderstanding of what I think is about to happen here or why it happened in the first place. I really think this is going to be about looking into their business practices and determining whether they were acting unethically based on the fact they had a monopoly. There are other companies who have quite a bit of control over a certain market, but there's also not the evidence that those companies are doing the things Ticketmaster is accused of doing. But we'll find out.

Awesome.

Here are a few theoretical questions:
-What if the government wants to regulate beer prices at Dodger Stadium?
-What if the government wants to start blocking player contracts saying they are too excessive?
-What about souvenirs?

The whole sporting and entertainment events industry is so out of control with costs.

I think Ticketmaster is an easy villain.

If Ticketmaster is using extortion tactics, then it should be criminal not civil/antitrust.

The reason for all these lawsuits and actions is that it is a way for states and Feds to extort large amounts of money from corporations to bring into their coffers.

The people affected get shit.

The lawyers and government make out and you get a check for $7.26.

What? WTF?

Just off the top of my head there is Boeing, Spirit, Cessna, Bombardier, Northrop Grumman, and Lockheed Martin.

WOW LOL
JUST...WOW

For a long time, many promotors or events were hit or miss. Some made money and some didn't.

The industry has taken off in the last 10 years as the US consumer is flush.

If this was a real problem, then stadiums and events wouldn't be so much in demand.

Ticketmaster's margins are not high .

Just look at NVDA's dominance. Better product, sky high margins and massive cash and profits.

It all makes sense now

https://i.imgur.com/W7CqKkS.jpg

I prefer the Thimble......:LOL:

A monopoly is the opposite of a free market. Livenation and Ticketmaster being the only game in town and being able to charge anything they want is not in the best interest of the American people. This is the exact thing the government should be doing more of.

They prevent artists from performing at places where they don't control ticket sales.

I'm hoping that's simple enough.

Tickets should be sold by whoever controls the venue. Simple. Not sure why a third-party ever got involved.

Or the performers could sell tickets directly to the public. They are the ones who are (or should be) the most concerned about making fans happy. Why would they leave any customer service up to a venue or some rotten dickhole entity like Ticketmaster?

Good point. You can stay at home and be a dickless loser posting Broncos tweets all day, all night. That will show Ticketmaster.

Strawman much?

If the free market is working, it should be left alone.

If the 'free market' has turned into an essentially unregulated monopoly, or a company that exerts so much power that there is no longer a free market and little prospect of a correction on its own..., then the government getting involved is the lesser of two evils.

No, people don't automatically have to go jail. You just want a functional free market. Free markets don't always happen by magic if left alone. Sometimes free markets end up with a monopoly.

Although if laws have been broke, sure.

It's not that hard in theory, even if it is hard in practice.