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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
Ticketmaster and Live Nation have destroyed the concert experience. But it didn’t use to be this way. Today, Oasis and Taylor Swift tickets might go for thousands of dollars, but back in 1955, you could see Elvis Presley in concert for less than the modern-day equivalent of $20.
It is a supply and demand curve.
The supply is incredibly small for a world-famous artist compared to their demand. If the reason some people can’t buy a ticket because there are no tickets left, there’s room to increase the price of the ticket and sell the exact same amount of tickets. If resellers can just buy all your tickets and sell them for 10x the price, then you can 10x the price of tickets and sell the same amount.
The problem is that you can’t just use the profits from selling Taylor swift tickets to make another Taylor swift so you can increase the supply of Taylor swift.
There are only 3 ways they can increase their Taylor swift profits: 1. Make concerts in bigger venues so they can sell more tickets. 2. Increase the ticket prices. 3. Increase the amount of Taylor swift concerts.
The easiest option is 2. why wouldn’t they do it?
Sure, if I was a music fan it’d suck, but the truth is that they are corporations, and they are legally required to increase the shareholders’ value.
It’s actually more of an issue of artificial supply and demand caused by a monopoly that controls ticket sales, secondary market, and venues. They’re also very hostile to performing artists, using their monopoly to force them to play more expensive venues and charge higher prices or risk blacklisting at virtually every major venue. It’s the kind of shit that anti-trust laws were created to prevent but, there has been little to no enforcement for near a half of a century.
First, this isn’t really true. Corporations are not required to increase shareholder value at any cost. Second, even if it were true, why would you still excuse those actions?