How to Kill Ticketmaster

Hello Predictable Revenue community,

Book update: final pre-order and first week sales numbers are in, we hit a total of 320. The big jump likely comes from international orders because they weren’t reported in and of the pre-sale numbers. We’re working to keep this momentum alive and if you have a minute, would you mind resharing Imants’ LinkedIn post about the book?

Promoting the book is never finished, but since it's officially launched, I felt like I could do something a little different today. Every now and then I get frustrated by a large incumbent with a dominant market position and think: what would it take for this company to fail?

Well, I was in New York last week and got to see a band called Lawrence. It got me thinking about the business model of a band. At one point I was in a band and thought I might pursue a career as a musician. I quickly came to realize that while I love music, I'm not talented enough to be a professional. I'm ok with that. I'm good at other things, but the experience left an impression on me. As I was heading out to Port Chester to see the show, I started thinking about how a band finds new customers (fans).

How Power Flows in Music Today

The proliferation of social media has shifted power from institutions to individuals, and not just in the music industry. Individual people can now wield the power of audience. While artists are gaining power in discovery and audience building, two giants still control the chokepoints that matter most: getting fans to shows and capturing the economics of live music. Understanding how these companies maintain their grip, and where that grip might weaken, reveals something important about how any dominant player eventually falls.

Live Nation + Ticketmaster together own the live music funnel. Booking, promotion, venues, and ticketing. Live Nation books and promotes the shows; Ticketmaster sells the tickets. Together they control the entire path from artist to fan.

Their dominance isn't built on a single advantage. It's two structural moats, and probably more, stacked on top of each other:

Cornered Resources. Multi-year exclusive contracts lock venues into Ticketmaster for primary ticketing rights. These deals are backed by advances that smaller competitors can't match. Add vertical integration (where the promoter and ticketing platform are the same company) and you get privileged access to both inventory (the tickets) and distribution (the tours and buildings). When contracts come up for renewal, competitors have to pry loose a venue while somehow matching the advances, hardware, service infrastructure, and political relationships. It's nearly impossible.

Switching Costs. Ticketmaster is deeply integrated into venue operations. Gate hardware, access control systems, point-of-sale and CRM platforms, marketing stacks, season-ticket workflows. Switching means long staff retraining, painful data migrations, and unwinding financial advances. The risk of something breaking during an active season or tour cycle keeps venues locked in.

The industry's greatest advantage has been keeping fans and bands separate. Venues make decisions based on reliability and economics, not what fans want. And fans don't choose the platform. They follow the inventory. Events are unique and inventory is captive, so the normal two-sided network effects you'd see in other platforms don't really apply here.

Where to Start 

As a fan, one of the things that sucks right now is not knowing when bands I love come to town.

Spotify has a concert alert feature, but it always tells me after tickets have gone on sale. Ticketmaster, those dickheads, does the same thing. I'm sure it's intentional with Ticketmaster. I'm not sure about Spotify. It seems like they'd have perfect data to time these notifications better, but they rarely alert me before shows go on sale. Only after, when I can buy more expensive tickets through the reseller.

Why? Resale tickets drive more revenue for Ticketmaster. They get to sell the same ticket multiple times and charge their transaction fees each time. Selling the same asset twice, and once for a significantly higher number, seems like an extremely profitable transaction for Ticketmaster.

You know what would be easier? If the artist just emailed me whenever they were going on tour and let me buy tickets directly from them. Even better if fans got first dibs on tickets. This could also help with the tour planning process. Imagine being able to know how many fans you had on your list in each city and how many times they’ve bought a ticket or merch. I suspect that would be incredibly helpful for planning the tour. 

Many bands don’t have an email list or they have one but don’t understand the importance of owning the primary relationship with their fans. Even with Lawrence's 214k YouTube followers, the algorithm still dictates whether or not I see new content from them (unless I click the bell). Social followings (Instagram, Meta, TikTok) work the same way. Posting does not guarantee exposure to your whole audience.

You know what does? An email newsletter.

The Phone Problem 

You know what sucks about a concert? I need to balance "just being there" in the moment with "wanting to remember" that particular performance. Phones in 2025 are pretty great at capturing a watchable mix of video and audio unlike a few years ago. I normally take a few pics and record a song but Lawrence is one of my kids' favourite bands, so I was doubly concerned and had my phone out more than I liked.

You know what I'd certainly trade my email address for? The full footage of the show, shot straight from a phone mounted at the front of the stage. No editing, no sound treatment, just raw.

This would be a huge win. Everyone can put their phone down and enjoy the show. The band use it as a way to get everyone's email addresses at the end of the night and build their list. Imagine a QR code that comes up on stage after the encore that says “join our email list and we’ll email you a video of the show + all the pictures we took”. I’m clicking that link 10 times out of 10. Then my phone can stay in my pocket and I can just enjoy the show.

When Bands Own Distribution

What happens when a band captures more than 80% of attendees' email addresses at their shows? They control their own distribution.

For a band in a van, the most valuable asset isn't access to Ticketmaster. It's having a direct channel to their fans.

Going on tour? Email the list. A friend's band is going on tour? Send an email to your list. Launching a new album? Hit the list.

When bands control their ability to reach fans directly, Ticketmaster's core value proposition (selling tickets and promoting shows) becomes less relevant. If artists get better at marketing themselves, helping fans discover them, and converting fans into recurring customers (yes, I'm SaaS-ifying the music industry), the middleman loses leverage.

The smartest bands would double down on owned channels: email, newsletters, communities. The future of music isn't selling tickets. It's creating direct relationships and recurring revenue.

How Monopolies Actually Fall

Government rarely kills monopolies. They fade when technology changes what matters.

The pattern repeats itself over and over. Courts file cases, issue rulings, impose restrictions. But by the time the legal system catches up, the market has already moved on. The monopoly either adapts or becomes irrelevant, not because a judge said so, but because the underlying game changed.

Look at Google and Chrome. The courts basically said they would do nothing because AI was stirring up enough change. The message was clear: the market will sort this out faster than we can.

Microsoft's story is even more instructive. The antitrust case forced them to make changes, split their browser from Windows, and open up APIs. But what actually impacted them? The shift to mobile and missing search. They lost those races. Both changes lessened the importance of their hold on the PC operating system and browser. The government didn't break Microsoft's monopoly. The iPhone did.

This is how cornered resources get eroded. Not through regulation, but through a fundamental shift in what matters. The resource that seemed unassailable becomes less relevant when the playing field moves. For Live Nation + Ticketmaster, failure won't come from lawsuits. It'll come from a shift in the relationship between a band and their fans.

Bands that create communities will be the new wave. Yes, it's more work. Building an email list, nurturing relationships, showing up consistently for your fans. It's harder than just booking shows through Live Nation and letting Ticketmaster handle the rest.

But it's the only chance we have to lessen Ticketmaster's grip.

If artists and fans connect directly, the middlemen lose their leverage. The exclusive venue contracts matter less when fans don't need to go through Ticketmaster to know when a show is happening. The scale economies matter less when bands can sell tickets through their own platforms. The switching costs matter less when the band controls the distribution channel.

The newsletter might become the new venue.

But let's be clear: this alone won't kill Ticketmaster. This is one piece of a much larger shift that would need to happen. Venues would still need a way to handle ticketing infrastructure. Payment processing, fraud prevention, gate scanning. Someone has to do it. And even if every band built a massive email list tomorrow, Ticketmaster's exclusive contracts don't expire for years.

What changes is the balance of power. When bands own the relationship with their fans, they have options. They can negotiate differently. They can experiment with alternative platforms. They can choose to work with venues that offer better terms. The cornered resource starts to erode, slowly at first, then all at once.

It's more work for bands, yes. But it's the only path that shifts leverage back to the people making the music.

Thanks for listening to my rant. If you’re working on any of this stuff, I’d love to chat. 

Collin 

PS - Does your brain do this too? Get frustrated by something and immediately start reverse-engineering their downfall? If so, let me know.

PPS - here are some more reviews that came in over the last week, if you haven’t had a chance to yet, you can pick up your copy of The Terrifying Art of Finding Customers now.