Re:How Booking.com manipulates users
by bogomipz on Thursday September 21, 2017 @07:56AM
(#15302441)
Ticket Master is part of Live Nation Entertainment and Live Nation is the Ticket Master of the promoter and venue side. They are the largest promoter in the US. If an artist tries to circumvent the TicketMaster/Live Nation monopoly they will find that they aren't able to book any of the venues in the market they need. This a near monopoly, they are the mob. No startup is going to "fix" this.
Live Nations was spun out of Clear Channel which controls the majority of the important radio stations in the US. Needless to say the relationship between Clear Channel and Live Nation is a very "special" one. See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_Nation_(events_promoter)
and
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/25/business/25ticket.html?mcu...
Re:How Booking.com manipulates users
by beefield on Thursday September 21, 2017 @03:02AM
(#15301107)
I find the current "market equilibrium" for both hotel booking and event ticket sales quite weird. I mean, both of them charge ridiculously high fares for a service that costs a fraction of that to produce. I mean, take hotel booking. Hotels could (technically) easily set up a booking co-operative (or two to get some competition), and refuse to sell anywhere else online. The fees to be able to run the co-operative would be sub 1%. It needs no marketing budget because that is the only site that comes up when googling hotels (others are dead).
Or then I am missing something in the market dynamics of hotel booking.
For tickets, some of that booking fee is actually going to the venue.
Sell Taylor Swift on a different booking system that isn't pathological to users. A few other top shelf performers. Venues will be switching like there's no tomorrow to keep the top performers.
The tricky part of this is getting an audience with people like Taylor Swift. On the other hand, with people like Trent Reznor working for Apple, if you had an alternative that worked well and didn't suck, you could probably get some attention pretty quickly.
It's almost as though there is a market that needs to be disrupted. And all the elements are there.