Comment on Live Nation/Ticket Master won't give you your tickets unless you install their app
penquin@lemm.ee 7 months agoBands have enough money and influence to do something about it instead of leaving us the helpless peasants fight for their livelihood. And comparing essential utilities to tickets isn’t a good one, my friend. Also, with ISPs and cellphone companies, we actually have plenty of options.
TheFriar@lemm.ee 7 months ago
I’m talking about the arrangement of how companies have worked since the deregulation 80s. Multiple huge bands have tried to change the monopoly Ticketmaster/livenation hold in the industry. And most bands that aren’t global phenomena are beholden to their record labels, who are beholden to Ticketmaster. Blaming the bands is pretty shitty. They’re about as powerless as we are, honestly.
Also, ISPs famously have divided the country up and all collectively decided to stay out of each other’s territories for the most part—and they are all running on OUR lines that are public. They supply the “last mile,” but we are still paying them to allow us access to our own infrastructure.
I’m just saying, there are so many examples of this. Airlines are the same. Greyhound busses. Trains. Search engines. Google. Credit reporting agencies. Big movie studios. Capitalism is beyond fucked up. Ticketmaster is one small part, and their lobbying power keeps their control. I buy plenty of tickets through smaller distributors like Dice. These are all pretty similar situations. You technically have some choice, but you’re route, your band, your internet, your cell phone carrier, your search engines…a lot of them have pretty much cornered a huge share of the market through power brokering/lobbying/VCs funding them. Look at ride shares. VCs drove the price down by operating at a loss for like a decade+. And now that they took over the market, they have all the power.
Your problem isn’t with the bands trying to make a living. It’s with capitalism.