Sadly there's very little space for startups to fix this. Live Nation/Ticket Master have a monopoly. I'm not sure how on earth they were allowed to merge. It's like merging all of the record labels with Apple/iTunes.
Yes, you can buy tickets on other sites but there's very little space for innovation and they hold the key, if they don't want you to do something innovative they can stop you and if you do succeed you're still funding your competitor.
I think you're slightly mistaken there. The merger that created this monopoly was TicketMaster and TicketsNow. TicketsNow was one of the largest names in the secondary market (what most people will commonly refer to as brokers and scalpers), where TicketMaster and LiveNation were both primary ticketing suppliers. The National Association of Ticket Brokers have been lobbying against this as a vertical monopoly, and have shown significant evidence that TicketMaster, when under contract to sell tickets at a certain price, will sell first to TicketsNow and then sell them at the market value on TicketsNow. They've lost a lot of money in law suits as a result and will continue to do so.
TicketMaster and LiveNation did merge in 2010, but that would be more like Apple and Google merging than Apple and iTunes.
I was under the impression that TicketsNow had very little market share. Aren't (EBay owned) StubHub, EBay and Craigslist the major players in the secondary market (excluding scalpers at the event)?
I have college basketball season tickets and my online account is integrated with TicketsNow (one click to electronically list my tickets to any game). I've tried using it as a seller and have had no interest in my tickets. The same tickets usually sell within a few days on StubHub.
As a buyer, I have checked TicketsNow on occasion and rarely find any tickets available for the event. One time I did find a great deal: 5th row center court tickets to a sold out game at face value. I think I got them because no other buyers had looked on the site.
It depends on if you're a consumer or a broker. If you're a consumer, sure, StubHub and CL will probably do the best for you, but that's because you're not a broker.
I'll definitely make some brokers angry by explaining this, but there are a few ticketing networks, the largest being TicketNetwork (TN).
TN is a SaaS play that costs somewhere in the $2500/year range, and goes up or down depending on which services you need. If I'm a broker I can simply get on TicketNetwork and list my tickets. We'll say I bought a ticket for $50 and I want to sell it for $100. I put it on the network at $100. TicketNetwork automatically updates it so that it's selling on your site for $100. Since it's on the network every other ticket broker has access to it, and they resell it for different amounts (standard is your price + 20%). So another ticket broker in my city would try to sell the ticket for $120 - they pay me $100, and I dropship it directly to the customer with a white-label packing slip.
There are about 800 brokers on the network at any given time and about $1 Billion in inventory. Some won't sell, most will. The affiliate payout in the ticket industry is among the highest, since it's super high margins. As a broker it's great, because as soon as you throw a ticket on the network you have 800 people trying to sell your ticket. But not just anyone can be on the Network - you have to pay a pretty penny for that opportunity, that keeps people like you out.
Where TicketsNow makes most of its money is in the selling. They have excellent marketing, great affiliates, and they are selling an absurd amount of tickets. They let you post your tickets on TicketsNow, but that's not where the real money is made, the real money is in selling other brokers' tickets that are much higher margins.
I'm not talking about Apple and iTunes merging but Live Nation (That owns the rights to the musicians and puts on the shows) and Ticket Master, who sells the tickets).
In my country, ticketing is per-venue. So if I want to go see an act at venue A, I go to their website and book from there. Acts' websites have lists of venues and dates, and direct people to the venues' websites to book. Most venues - at least the ones hosting things I attend - are independent of one another.
This doesn't seem like a natural monopoly to me - a new startup can sign up venues one at a time. Is the situation different in America?
That was the situation, but they all signed with TicketMaster because TicketMaster had the best point of sale software for tickets. Technically ticketing is still per-venue and they are independent, they just all use TicketMaster.
This isn't always 100% true, as some venues have similar owners, but that's a bit beside the point.
The problem is that it's very hard to penetrate Ticketmaster's market because of the sneaky way they maintain their monopoly. They offer large up-front payments (a.k.a. bribes) to venues in exchange the exclusive rights to sell tickets to events at those venues over the Internet. Ticketmaster than passes those costs on to the consumer. It is not unlike the way in which credit card companies maintain their monopoly by offering "deals" (miles, cash back, whatever, it all amounts to the same thing: bribes) to consumers to use their cards and then extract the costs of those bribes from the merchants who end up passing the costs back to the consumers. Credit card rules until recently have forbidden merchants from passing those costs on selectivey to credit card users, so the net result is essentially that credit cards users are subsidized by non-users, which provides a strong incentive for people to use credit cards, which maintains the monopoly. It's an underhanded strategy IMHO. But it's also quite effective.
Yes, you can buy tickets on other sites but there's very little space for innovation and they hold the key, if they don't want you to do something innovative they can stop you and if you do succeed you're still funding your competitor.