Ticketmaster Entertainment, Inc. is a ticket sales and distribution company based in West Hollywood, California, USA, with operations in many countries around the world. Most US ticket sales for US venues are fulfilled at the Ticketmaster two main fulfillment centers located in Charleston, West Virginia and Pharr Texas. Typically, Ticketmaster's clients (promoters) control their events, and Ticketmaster simply acts as an agent, selling the tickets that the clients make available to them.
Ticketmaster sells many of its tickets online, some via phone, and some through its many ticket outlets.
In January 2009, Ticketmaster acquired a UK ticket exchange site, Getmein.com. Getmein is a ticket exchange site that allows sellers to list the tickets at whatever price they choose. It claims to have over 500,000 tickets listed at any one time.
On 10 January 2008, Ticketmaster completed the acquisition of Paciolan Inc. after the deal was subject to months of litigation over the potential breach of antitrust laws. Paciolan is a developer of ticketing system applications and hosted ticketing systems. On 10 February 2009, Ticketmaster and Live Nation, the largest concert promoter, officially announced their merger deal.. The new company will take the Live Nation name and will be Live Nation Entertainment. In October 2009, the United Kingdom's Competition Commission provisionally ruled against the merger.
Customer Service
Ticketmaster is one of a number of organizations which have migrated to web based booking systems with no equivalent web/e-mail based system for queries/complaints. This allows them to achieve the benefits of the change to on-line purchasing without the concomitant costs of providing matching customer service. They do have an E-Mail service for Canada at TicketMaster.ca/email
Service fees
Ticketmaster collects no part of advertised ticket prices, in lieu it adds services fees to boost its earnings. Consumers often find these markups unreasonably excessive, especially because there are many instances where no alternative purchase method is offered (allowing the purchase of tickets without incurring fees). This business practice, along with a dearth of competitors, has led many to view Ticketmaster as monopolistic. Alternative ticketing companies have emerged but due to Ticketmaster's exclusive agreements with a large percentage of venues the company does not need to lower service fees. In some instances customers may be able to buy tickets directly from the venue, which may make its own service charge
The typical fees levied by Ticketmaster, in addition to a ticket's face value include:
- Service Charge
This is Ticketmaster's charge for the general service they provide and maintain. You will pay this charge no matter which way you buy the tickets through Ticketmaster (Phone, online or in person at a ticket center), although the amount of the charge may be different for different channels and different payment methods.
- Building Facility Charge
This is determined by the venue, and not Ticketmaster.
- Processing Charge
This is Ticketmaster's charge for processing your order and making the tickets available to you. This is usually not a per ticket charge, but rather a per order charge.
- Shipping Charge, E-Ticket Convenience Charge, or Will Call Charge
Ticketmaster charges a fee for ticket delivery, whether the tickets are mailed to the customer, printed out at home, or collected from the venue. Seemingly paradoxically, the charge for printing out the ticket at home is often higher than the fee to have the ticket physically mailed to you, even though the cost to Ticketmaster is lower. In other sectors, such as airline ticketing, companies usually do not charge (or even offer a discount), for electronic ticketing. Economist Emily Oster of the Chicago Business School suggests that this reflects the lack of competition in the industry, with customers willing to pay more for the convenience of obtaining the tickets immediately due to a lack of alternate options.
As an example of a typical markup, a ticket to see Britney Spears at the Nissan Pavilion in 2004 cost $56. In addition to this, Ticketmaster levied fees of $4.10 (processing charge), $3.50 (facility charge) and $9 (convenience charge), a total of $16.60, almost 30% of the ticket's original price. In some instances service charges can amount to up to 50% of a ticket's face value.
Ticketmaster has come under attack from those who claim its fees are excessive, with 40 British MPs signing an early day motion criticizing the company for overcharging and for the lack of transparency in its pricing structure.
Ticket sales market
Ticketmaster frequently obtains agreements to become the sole provider of tickets for large venues, in keeping with a business strategy it has used since the 1980s when it consolidated regional ticketing services into a single entity. In many cases, acquiring this exclusivity requires Ticketmaster to pay substantial "signing bonuses" to venues, sometimes millions of dollars. Although this practice can significantly reduce the profitability to Ticketmaster of these exclusive relationships, to date using these bonuses has enabled them to maintain venue exclusivity as a competitive strategy, though the future viability of this strategy is unclear as the Internet as the primary sales channel for tickets makes exclusivity a less attractive option for venues.
Ticketmaster is the subject of frequent complaints in the media due to high ticket service charges. Notably, in the 1990s, Pearl Jam brought a lawsuit alleging that Ticketmaster is a monopoly, whose anticompetitive practices allow markup prices of more than 30%. The case was acquitted because ticket purchasers were not deemed to be the actual customers of Ticketmaster.
Recently, there appears to have been questionable dealings between Ticketmaster and TicketsNow.com (which was acquired by Ticketmaster in January 2008). An anonymous source alleges that a TicketsNow executive assisted with the sale of more than $1 million worth of Radiohead tickets on the TicketsNow website There appears to be a conflict of interest when a company operates in both the primary and secondary sales markets, and furthers claims about the negative implications of Ticketmaster's Monopoly on ordinary consumers.
Competitors include Vendini, Inc., VenueDriver, LLC, Tickets.com, ShowClix, StubHub, Classictic, TicketBiscuit, TicketExperts.com, TicketLiquidator.com, , TicketVendor.com and others. TicketWeb, a Ticketmaster subsidiary also offers lower fees. These companies are typically excluded from primary ticket sales for major-league sports events in the U.S. (with the exception of Major League Baseball, which, as noted below, is now the owner of Tickemaster's number two competitor Tickets.com).
A new brand of competition has emerged in the form of companies selling ticket futures contracts. Web-based companies such as Yoonew and TicketReserve offer ticket futures which guarantee customers tickets to big games such as the Super Bowl and World Series if the team for which they have futures contracts makes it. Though the price of ticket futures are often substantially lower than the price of actual tickets to the big event, customers risk losing their investment if their team does not make it. Yoonew, in addition, provides an exchange where ticket futures can be traded between users.
Ticketmaster is the primary ticket seller for 27 of the 30 NHL teams and 28 of 30 NBA teams, but in 2005, Major League Baseball acquired Ticketmaster rival Tickets.com. Some analysts expect MLB to stop using Ticketmaster for the sale of its approximately 100,000,000 baseball tickets per year once current contracts with Ticketmaster have expired. Thus, when the Ticketmaster contracts end, finding sources for primary or "box office" tickets online may become a difficult task and vertical ticket search engines may become indispensable for finding primary ticket outlets.
Also of concern to the company is declining sales in the highly profitable concert business. Off by double-digit percentages in 2005 from 2004, the summer concert season is a major profit center for the company with its high per-ticket prices and accompanying high service fees.
Ticketmaster has had only limited success in the secondary ticketing market. In September 2003, Ticketmaster announced plans to sell tickets in internet auctions, which would bring the price of tickets closer to market prices, but its market share compared to that of eBay or Stubhub remains small, and Internet auctions are still a relatively minor part of its business. Indeed, since around the time of the 2003 announcement, Ticketmaster has lost the lead in the secondary ticketing market to new entrants like Stubhub, who have developed a popular and effective person-to-person market for tickets. Recently, Ticketmaster President Sean Moriarty appeared on a story about the ticketing business on NPR and pleaded for legislation that would make the selling of tickets from person to person illegal except through Ticketmaster's own product for this purpose. Ticketmaster established the Ticketmaster Ticketexchange to try to compete with Stubhub, their main tagline being that tickets are 100% guaranteed to be authentic, since they are sold through the season ticket holder's account. (Some NFL teams require people to be on the waiting list in order to use the service. The New England Patriots, New York Giants and New York Jets require waiting list memberships.)
In Canada, Ticketmaster is try
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