monopoly

Time to break TicketMaster’s monopoly?

by alec on March 2, 2009

That TicketMaster has a monopoly on the sale of event tickets in North America is not in dispute. Now that they have achieved that monopoly, however, how should they behave? Case in point, my own attempts to buy tickets for Leonard Cohen’s Ottawa show on May 25 / 26. After advertising all last week that the tickets would go on sale at 10:00 AM today, not a ticket was available by 10:03. It’s inconceivable that all 4,800 seats sold out in 3 minutes. Inconceivable.

No, two things happened:

Ticketmaster’s partnership with American Express – the Front of the Line program which allows AMEX card holders to purchase tickets 7 days in advance of the general public – is being abused by scalpers who snap up tickets in advance of the show and sell them on eBay.
Ticketmaster themselves have effectively become ticket scalpers with their sister site TicketsNow which sells tickets for prices dramatically higher than their face value.

As of 10:03, eBay sellers had the tickets. I could buy from a gentleman in Norwalk Connecticut. However, no tickets were available locally in Ottawa, where the show was taking place.

The venue for the show is Canada’s National Arts Center – a tax payer subsidized facility constructed in the 1960’s to showcase Canadian art. A Canadian artist is coming to play the venue. No tickets are available to Canadian fans, except via US scalpers. It’s offensive.

It’s clear there’s no competition in the ticketing business any more. Perhaps it’s time trustbusters on both sides of the border looked into TicketMaster’s business practices. Imposing limits on pre-sales, and requiring TicketMaster to halt it’s own scalping business would be a good place to start.

Ticketmaster CEO Amenable to Sale of TicketsNow (wired.com)
Ticketmaster Is Not Having A Great Week, But Neither Are Ticket Buyers [Screw You, Consumer!] (idolator.com)
Ticketmaster CEO: Secondary ticketing should be illegal (guardian.co.uk)
Scalping suit filed against Ticketmaster Canada (canada.com)
Is Ticketmaster Taking Advantage? (consumer-alerts-product-recalls.suite101.com)
Ticketmaster’s resale site angering consumers (thestar.com)
Ticketmaster denies resale site has easy ticket access (ctv.ca)
Ticketmaster says pricey resale tickets protect consumers (cbc.ca)
Springsteen ticket resale row prompts investigations (cbc.ca)
Ticketmaster dominance in Canada entrenched by planned merger (cbc.ca)

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Selling Papers (the Power of a Catchy Headline)

by alec on June 20, 2006

Opera CTO Hakon Wium Lie knows the power of a good headline.Â In Microsoft’s Forgotten Monopoly, he writes about the need for the web community to embrace fonts beyond the “Core Fonts for the Web” donated by Microsoft to the Internet community in 1996.Â He’s right!Â Firstly, those fonts are, frankly, stale, and secondly, Microsoft no longer wishes to support them.Â It’s at that point, however, that Hakon takes a sharp turn left into the reality distortion zone.Â He tries to paint Microsoft’s actions as those of a sinister monopolist bent on dominating the market for free fonts given away on the web. Eh?

It might sell papers, but it makes about as much sense as this Weekly World News about the Discovery of Death’s Door. Except, of course, that the Weekly World News is a lot more fun to read…

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High end Ontario wine outlets?

January 22, 2004

Liberals like idea of stores showcasing Ontario wines, reports the Toronto Star. This is a good development. It’s criminal that it’s easier to buy a bottle of Australian or French than Ontario in the provincially run MONOPOLY’s store, when Niagara is less than 2 hours from the main depot for the store.

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McIdiocy

November 27, 2003

Ontario bill would outlaw two-tier health care. Dalton McGuinty’s Liberals really are dogmatic gits. Why can’t I spend my hard earned dollars in any fashion I choose? What if I, as a business person, wanted to invest money in a private clinic in Ontario? And what if I had patients who wanted to spend their [...]

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