Posted on 11/29/2022 3:34:16 PM PST by jfd1776
The lovely and prolific Taylor Swift announced a concert tour. So far, so good. Happens every day.
Ticketmaster opened up the ticket sales process, and sold 2 million tickets while fielding 3.5 billion requests – yes, 3.5 billion – before server crashes and other problems caused them to suspend sales.
Taylor Swift is furious. Millions of fans are frustrated. Live Nation the parent of Ticketmaster, is embarrassed.
And politicians – ranging from communist US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to conservative US Senator Mike Lee – are all demanding hearings.
It’s easy to kid about the disproportionate attention this is getting in the political world. We are enduring record economic pain today. Fuel and grocery prices are costing the average family several thousand dollars extra each year, demonstrating how laughably understated the official inflation rate really is. With a more dangerous world scene than we have faced in decades, our military can’t attract recruits. American elections are being recognized the world over as embarrassingly corrupt. And a shocking percentage of the people who most desperately need jobs have been conditioned by three years of sloth to refuse to apply for them.
And it is against this backdrop of serious issues that our politicians call for hearings about a few rock concerts?
Yes, it is. And it is tempting to believe that this just might be an example of politicians baldly trying to attract the young and apathetic by pretending to care about their precious non-issues for once.
The truth is, however, they are not as far off as they may appear. However crass their motive may be, the question at the heart of this furor is worth exploring. The main problem is that they don’t realize what that question really is.
News reports this week have focused on the lack of competition in the arena of major concert venues and box office sales firms. These politicians are concentrating on the fact that the nation’s largest ticket selling service, and the nation’s largest owner of live entertainment venues were joined in a federally-approved merger, raising serious anti-trust questions.
Left unsaid is the fact that it made sense for this concert tour to use Ticketmaster. If Ticketmaster couldn’t handle these 3.5 billion online requests from people, scalpers and bots, it’s hard to imagine that anyone else could have either.
An honest hearing will likely reveal that Ticketmaster was understandably overwhelmed, no crime was committed, and the Taylor Swift concert debacle does not constitute proof of any antitrust violation. If the question asked is the one we expect, the result will be the appearance that the system is working just fine, and the country made no mistake in approving this merger.
What the politicians will not ask, however, because they never ask it, is the right question, the fundamental question:
Why do huge companies seek these mergers in the first place?
Both Congress and the federal regulatory bureaucracy have public discussions about mergers all the time. Two media companies, two news organizations, two telephone services, and now, two live entertainment companies.
Again and again, our federal government asks the question, should we allow this merger?
It’s the wrong question. By the time such a merger has been proposed, both companies have already come to the conclusion that they cannot succeed in providing value to both their customers and their shareholders unless they merge.
That should be our focus; that should be the question that animates our elected officials.
How is it, in the most well developed and productive large economy in human history, that so many enormous companies cannot figure out how to be profitable, unless they merge with other huge companies and accomplish some further economies of scale in so doing?
Gentle Reader, you and I could answer the question, of course.
We could tell them it’s because a crippling tax burden raises the costs of these businesses so high, it is harder than it should be for them to make a profit. We could tell them it’s because a crippling tax burden leaves their potential customers with so little discretionary income, they have to charge lower prices than they want in order to fill the seats. We can tell them it’s because an outrageous regulatory burden forces these companies to employ armies of lawyers and accountants, and to fund incredibly expensive bonds and insurance plans, to be protected from the penalties and litigation that this regulatory burden so often creates.
The politicians love to complain about these big mergers. We all do. America was designed to be a country of small businesses. These multinational conglomerates are indeed contrary to the notion of an entrepreneurial, free-market economy.
But instead of politicians pointing fingers at bureaucrats, asking why they allowed this merger or that one, it is time our politicians took up the cause of eliminating the need for such mergers.
It is time Washington, DC again tried to build an economy in which companies can make a steady profit without having to beg the government to permit yet another massive mash-up.
Many politicians consider themselves to have done their job when they hold a hearing. But in fact, they will have truly served their public only when they find a way to stop DC from driving struggling companies into the arms of their competitors.
Now, that would be a hearing worth watching.
Copyright 2022 John F. Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based trade compliance trainer and transportation manager, writer, and actor. A one-time county chairman of the Milwaukee County Republican Party, and former president of the Ethnic American Council, he has been writing regularly for Illinois Review since 2009.
A collection of John’s Illinois Review articles about vote fraud, The Tales of Little Pavel, and his 2021 political satires about current events, Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes One and Two, are available, in either paperback or eBook, only on Amazon.
It is true that large corporations are heavily regulated, and theoretically taxed, however there are all sorts of outs for businesses with fewer employees.
This seems a bit like libertarian freemarket unicorn petting.
Supply and demand is real.
Bread and Circuses
Nothing wrong with concert tours. People are allowed to have fun.
And unless I missed it, Swift has kept a pretty low profile lately. I didn't see her out there on the stump pimping for abortion or Democrats this election cycle.
Hell, we still don't know if she even got vaccinated!
Cannot? No! They merge because they think they will make more money. The customer is secondary and often the victim of these mergers.
And if TicketMaster had their act together and enough bandwidth and computing power to handle demand, they would have just sold out of tickets in under a minute. Instead of getting an error message customers would have gotten a "sold out" message. The big problem was the much greater demand than supply along with Taylor Swift making promises to her fans if they bought her stuff that they would have priority buying tickets.
Hogwash. There is a simple way to handle this. They don't want to. They want to create the appearance of extreme demand. They want ticket brokers to charge exorbitant fees because that's what drives demand for 3 billion more tickets than they have available.
Just do it by lottery. You want a ticket, you have a week to sign up and enter your payment information. Then, the lucky few who win the lotter will get their tickets and have their cards charged - with the tickets being sent to the billing address on the card.
We won't know that unless she dies unexpectedly.
Tay Tay!
Taylor Swift may be the worst at picking boyfriends than any other woman in history. She’s totally impossibly hot but only seems to attract losers. At least according to her songs.
Huh. And here I thought the demand was driven by Taylor Swift being really, really popular. But in fact, all those people who waited on the phone and spent all that money did so only because they were really excited about the prospect of paying huge fees.
Who knew?
You think she could sell 2.5 billion tickets?
The idea that high fees are charged to drive up demand is preposterous. You don't even know the amount of the fee until you actually get the tickets in your cart and go to checkout, which means that the demand pre-existed disclosure/knowledge of the fees.
I wasn’t talking about the fees, though my opinion is they are absurd. As is the cost of a beer at the shows. I was talking about the sentence I quoted - which is that I believe Ticketmaster/LiveNation loves the way they have it set up precisely because they know they will sell out shows to bots and ticket brokers and exaggerate the appearance of demand. It’s not just about this one artist or one tour they have the system, it’s theirs, and they game it.
First of all Taylor Swift is one of the most popular concert draws. SHe has legions of hardcore fans and there are all kinds of automated bots that are trying to snatch up tickets so they can resell them to the die fans who will pay just about anything. It’s no wonder the system couldn’t handle the load. If they want to stop this sort of thing they have to make ticket scalping illegal again. Like the airlines make them good ONLY for the person who purchased them and show id when you show up.
Gabby Petito picked a worse boyfriend than Taylor ever did.
I’ve never heard a TS song, but have seen pictures of her. I don’t find her hot at all, but recognize that reasonable minds can differ on that.
Some libertarian pundit for a NJ newspaper suggested years ago that the best way to sell tickets to concerts and sporting events is through a “Dutch auction” approach. Start the price at $25,000 per ticket, and reduce it in $1 increments every minute until people start buying them online. Once the price is fixed, keep the price fixed until no more orders are placed for 5 minutes … then reduce the price in $1 increments again. Repeat the process until all the tickets are sold.
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