Ticketmaster Essay

Yes, I think that TicketMaster is a monopoly. They have integrated both vertically and horizontally, and have a very big majority of control in the ticket selling business. It is close to impossible to compete with Ticketmaster, and very unlikely to succeed in an attempt to join the ticket selling business. In 1993, a co-founder of Microsoft, Paul Allen, invested in 80% of the company. This aided in the transformation of TicketMaster from a smaller ticketing company to a bigger information technology company. Because of this, they were selling over 52 million tickets, and over a billion dollars in revenue within just a year. Only five years later, in 1998, InterActive Corporation and Citysearch came together and bought a majority stake in the company. This allowed for the online aspect of Ticketmaster to become even better, as they sold tickets and merchandise online. In the 2000s, Interactive Corporation bought multiple other companies in the ticket-selling business, such as TicketWeb.

Directly after this spinoff, Front Line Management made a deal with Ticketmaster. Front Line management is a firm that controls management and representation for many entities. They have exclusive rights to sell concert tickets with clients. This partnership caused a rivalry between Ticketmaster and LiveNation Entertainment. LiveNation was America’s largest ticketing company in the 2000s. In 2009n, there was talk of a merger between LiveNation and Ticketmaster. In 2010 the companies officially merged together, which ultimately created what many people, including myself, call a monopoly today. TicketMaster’s customer database grew from 25 million to 96 million in just about a year because of this