BREAKING: Justice Department sues Ticketmaster and owner Live Nation, alleging an illegal monopoly over live events in the U.S. https://t.co/yMlRYo0WqR
Originally Posted by :
“We allege that Live Nation relies on unlawful, anticompetitive conduct to exercise its monopolistic control over the live events industry in the United States at the cost of fans, artists, smaller promoters, and venue operators,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement. “The result is that fans pay more in fees, artists have fewer opportunities to play concerts, smaller promoters get squeezed out, and venues have fewer real choices for ticketing services. It is time to break up Live Nation-Ticketmaster.”
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. [Reply]
Originally Posted by KCJake:
Remember when you just called the arena to buy tickets the morning they went on sale? When did it all change??
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. [Reply]
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 fuck 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, fuck you."
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 fucked 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. [Reply]
Originally Posted by Bearcat:
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."
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. [Reply]