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| Dual threats for the Secondary Ticket Market from the Live Nation Ticketmaster Merger |
 by Richard KasteleinOP/ED - Could electronic ticketing, like that deployed by Miley Cyrus in her concert tour last year, which froze out the secondary ticket market, be on the horizon with the formation of live entertainment giant Live Nation Entertainment? Paperless ticketing has been a US experiment for Ticketmaster, more or less, and was left at the artist's discretion... but it also caused problems by lowering attendance (not everyone has a credit card/ID needed to get in the gates - particularly kids) and reduced revenue overall. And the question remains, would adoption of paperless ticketing for Live Nation Entertainment also mean they will shut themselves out of their own immensely lucrative secondary ticketing marketplaces? Or will the fact that the new live entertainment giant was allowed
to keep it's US and European secondary ticket market platforms mean
they will simply shun paperless and reroute normal tickets to their hugely-profitable reselling
sites at UK's GETMEIN!, TicketsNow and TicketExchange? And then shut
down the a large chunk of ticket traffic that has been making its way
to the open online secondary market via promoters, artists, sponsors,
venues, promoters and advertisers. Ray Waddell of Billboard notes: By allowing Ticketmaster to keep ticket reseller TicketsNow, the DOJ did little to protect the interests of secondary market leader StubHub and other local and regional resellers. There's no doubt that the newly merged company will seek to dominate ticket reselling, with distribution and artist relationships on its side. "It's definitely a huge threat," says Don Vacarro, CEO of ticket aggregator TicketNetwork. "(Live Nation) will funnel even more tickets to the secondary market because the DOJ is giving them carte blanche.The new company, formed during the merger of Ticketmaster and Livenation will own more than 140 concert venues globally, sell over 140 million tickets and promote 22 thousand concerts a year in a supplier-to-consumer chain that will not only dominate the US but also Europe - where they have substantial venue properties and control the careers of a huge percentage of A-list acts, and the concerts that make the real money. Live Nation Entertainment will also pour and sell the beer, vend the tshirts, hats, cups and all the merchandise, control and charge for parking, organize and plan the tours of hundreds of the world's top acts, make decisions on album releases, etc. In other words, they own the vertical. And their musician stable includes the likes of U2, Madonna, Jay-Z and the Eagles. Competition, whether from AEG, CTS Eventim, Comcast, Seetickets or others will be moot, with a few token divestments such as unloading Paciolan, its ticketing and software services unit, to Comcast's sports, and licensing its software to Anschutz Entertainment Group (AEG), the new company’s largest customer. Joe Cohen, CEO of European secondary ticket marketplace Seatwave told the BBC: "They're both publicly traded companies in the US," he said. "And if you look at their investure presentations over the last 5 years, they really crow about how good they have been at raising prices." "That's as individual, independent companies and you think if they come together, and have this much control over the value chain, they're going to continue to raise prices and that's bad for fans." The merger was primarily fueled when Ticketmaster, a company that completely dominated the live music ticketing business by snapping up seven of its main rivals, was suddenly facing a challenge to its dominating 83 per cent market share. Its biggest customer, Live Nation, the world's largest venue manager and concert promoter, suddenly figured out that software for selling tickets was not that complicated, decided to launch its own ticketing subsidiary. They quickly grabbed 16 per cent of the market and Ticketmaster retaliated by buying Front Line Management, which manages tours for 200 of the country's top music artists to cut into Live Nation's market.By early last year, the war morphed into a free-for-all, price-reducing, service-improving challenge that fans loved and shareholders hated. Publically traded and privately engaged, the behemoths figured the investors would be happier if they called a truce and started work on a merger. Obama's antitrust team recently told the press it was prepared to block the transaction, yet within a week it was all thumbs up. On the merger approval, both stocks jumped over 15 per cent. Wall Street 1 - Music Fans - 0. Related Articles: Online ticket retailer Seatwave beats postal strike through HMV partnership Seatwave and UK music retailer, HMV, have joined up with Seatwave in launching an in-store music ticket box office. The partnership will allow customers to buy and sell tickets in HMV right up to the day of the event. Seatwave will also launch an online ticket exchange for HMV.
"We see a great... Block this music monopoly - TM/LN merger will hurt concert consumers. by David Balto (originally published at Philly.com)
Nine months after Ticketmaster announced its proposed merger with Live Nation, the Justice Department's antitrust investigation seems to be entering the ninth inning, and the bases are loaded. Numerous consumer groups and 50 members of... EU Ticket News in BETA EU Ticket News is now in the BETA stage - we are still building up the site and are almost ready to go live.
As a pioneering news and opinion site in the B2B primary and secondary ticketing market in Europe, we plan to bring readers important and fresh information on a regular basis.
We also... About EU Ticket News EUTicket News Contributors
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EU Ticket News provides comprehensive B2B news coverage and market analysis for and about the European ticketing and events industries.
It features breaking news and opinion on the European ticketing and events markets – in addition to the... Hundreds of ticketing professionals attend 2nd annual Ticket Summit in New York City by Alfred Branch Jr.
An estimated 500 ticket brokers and other ticketing professional descended on the Waldorf=Astoria for Ticket Summit this week, where the attendees networked with their cohorts and learned what the future holds for the secondary ticket market.
Live Nation Unloads U.K. Theatre Division for Approximately U.S. $160 Million Live Nation
, the world's largest live music company, recently announced that it has
closed the sale of its remaining U.K. theatrical venues and operations
to The Ambassador Theatre Group, an owner and operator of regional
theatres in the United Kingdom. In addition, on October 23, 2009,...
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Comments (3)
Z
said:
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How Exactly will the Merger Hurt the Secondary Ticket Market You quoted Don Vacarro above saying it is definitely a huge threat. To whom? I just want to understand what people in the secondary ticket market think will cause problems because of this merger. Is it because this new merged Live Nation Entertainment funnels all its customers to their secondary ticket companies (like with the Springsteen debacle)? Even so, won't there still be plenty of tickets on the secondary market to sell? The paperless ticketing thing seems to be the worse of two, potentially. But how will this merger negatively affect the online secondary ticket market? |
Richard Kastelein
said:
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Threats The quote from http://in.reuters.com/article/...Channel=0 The threat, aside from paperless, is to route more tickets to secondary market themselves. As was allegedly done with Springsteen and the redirects from Ticketmaster to Ticketsnow where prices were 4-5 times face value. That's the precedent and that's what Vacarro is talking about. Just google springsteen ticketmaster and ticketsnow and you will find plenty of reporting on it. |
Richard Kastelein
said:
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... The other issue, which I did not mention here, is that companies that merge to increase their monopolies over the market always result in more expensive products. There are more reasons why a profit-maximizing, publically owned, firm like Live Nation Entertainment (LNE) want to exclude the broad secondary industry. One... taking on the typical uncertainty and risk aversion on the part of LNE removes the opportunity for speculation of tickets by the secondary market. LNE could simply raise prices and make arbitrage or a middleman unneccessary. Another angle could be that LNE creates some kind of dynamic revenue model which creates a new arbitrage opportunity. Or they simply go on a buying spree and buy out the largest players in the online secondary market and take full control. |
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