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September 12, 2008
Ticketmaster Loses its 2 Largest Clients
In the war of who's going dominate the ticket selling market for concerts and events, Live Nation has only just begun to challenge West Hollywood based Ticketmaster. A recent deal will let Live Nation sell the majority of tickets for SMG, a Philadelphia company that manages more than 200 major venues including The Forum in Inglewood. "SMG, owned by private-equity firm American Capital Ltd., is estimated to be Ticketmaster's second-largest client," reports the Wall Street Journal.
Live Nation, which is also a concert promoter for venues like the newly renovated Hollywood Palladium, currently has a contract for Ticketmaster for their own events. Interestingly enough, Live Nation is Ticketmaster's largest client bringing in over a billion dollars in ticket sales but the concert promoter plans to start using their own ticketing service in January when the Ticketmaster contract expires.
Last month, Ticketmaster parent company IAC/InterActiveCorp spun them and three other internet sites to make five separate publicly traded companies.
Photo by Phil Romans via Flickr
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Good. A big FUCK YOU to Ticketmaster. They continually rip off people, overcharge for their "convenience", and have terrible customer service.
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Yay! Instead of the Ticketmaster 50% price markup in surcharges when buying tickets, LiveNation is promising to give us free stuff.
So excited for this change!
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Changing out Ticketbastard for some other corporation hell bent on ruining music leaves me about as hopeful as changing out one career politician for another will change our system of government.
Still, it probably couldn't be worse could it?*
*the last time I asked this, Janet Reno was replaced by John Ashcroft
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Damn, I wanted to use "Ticketbastard" in a witty comment but Colfax beat me to it.
True - I'm waiting to see the standard Live Nation charges before celebrating. Moving from a monopoly to a cartel isn't the most promising of changes. (De Beers is a cartel.)
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good. i hate ticketmaster. if tickets are only available online through ticket master, i make a point of going and buying directly from the box office to get around their absurd convenience charges. i bought tickets to a 3-day festival on ticketmaster once and they charged me THREE convenience charges - one for every day of the festival - even though there was only ONE pass for all three days. ticketmaster=evil
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Serves them right, greedy bastards. Always hated them.
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Anything that competes against Ticketmaster is fine by me..about time those bastards got a taste of FAIR competition.
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I'm with estarla, I'm going to wait until I see how much Live Nation charges but I'm hopeful. Anything has got to be better than f-ing Ticketmaster.
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Madness?
No.
This. Is. SPARTA!