TM also has huge vertical integration. If you want to perform a live show at almost any mid/large venue your tour is likely to be managed by Live Nation, and they are integrated down to artist representation.
SongKick took a stab at breaking TicketMaster, as did PearlJam, and a few others. Everyone has failed so far.
This is clearly monopolistic and harmful to concert goers, and StubHub (also a Ticketmaster/LiveNation company) was fined a few years ago for selling tickets at a premium which were never made available to the public.
The whole industry is so shady, it's pathetic that this is allowed to continue.
How is that legal under Sherman Act?
Ian Hogarth of SongKick describes how he first fought the anti-trust.
I've bought Broadway tickets at the box office to save on processing fees, and they just printed out TicketMaster tickets.
And worse, you can't split a venue up to 2 different sellers. They don't have a communication protocol for which seats are sold, so you end up in a position of double-booking. Also bad.
Basically the only way for this to work is:
a) a system exists where venues publish an event and seating
b) the system does nothing but keep track of sales and seats. They don't care who sold, just tracking that it was sold. Also allow full API access so any service can reserve and claim the seat, the service is now on the hook for that seat.
c) allow venues to indicate which services can sell their tickets
This will commodotize ticketmaster, but at the same time, there will very little value add, so who would compete. It'll be a race to the bottom with barely any money. And the service you build could take a small fee at best otherwise nobody would use you. AND you'd be competing against ticketmaster with almost no money.
And don't forget, the double booking problem... Your service will have to basically integrate with ticketmaster, who will never willingly do this given that you'll commodotize them, and they will not simply sacrifice themselves just to make some sort of positive outcome, and then also be completely beholden to another company.
Its a perfect monopoly field.
I used to try that - in order to avoid ticketmaster fees. For most venues, even if you buy tickets at the venue, it is a ticketmaster terminal/printer that prints the tickets out. And you still pay the ticketmaster fees.
They charge a $5 fee for physical tickets now. It's less than their online bullshit, but it's still bullshit.
Last time I tried that the venue processed the sale through TicketMaster and I got a TicketMaster ticket.
Live nation also runs most of the major music festivals too as they bought them up.
It's essentially the venues and artists outsourcing the job of "being the asshole" to TicketMaster as a large chunk of the money eventually flow back. They get to publicly blame TicketMaster, claim they have no involvement, and still get their slice of the "processing fees".
If you are attending any event and you can actually buy the tickets directly at the box office then go that route. You'll likely save anywhere from 25-60% off the price of the tickets. Plus you'll get actual physical tickets.
Sure this doesn't work for some crazy in demand show, but nobody goes to those anyway right?