Mildly Infuriating

I’m talking about the arrangement of how companies have worked since the deregulation 80s. Multiple huge bands have tried to change the monopoly Ticketmaster/livenation hold in the industry. And most bands that aren’t global phenomena are beholden to their record labels, who are beholden to Ticketmaster. Blaming the bands is pretty shitty. They’re about as powerless as we are, honestly.

Also, ISPs famously have divided the country up and all collectively decided to stay out of each other’s territories for the most part—and they are all running on OUR lines that are public. They supply the “last mile,” but we are still paying them to allow us access to our own infrastructure.

I’m just saying, there are so many examples of this. Airlines are the same. Greyhound busses. Trains. Search engines. Google. Credit reporting agencies. Big movie studios. Capitalism is beyond fucked up. Ticketmaster is one small part, and their lobbying power keeps their control. I buy plenty of tickets through smaller distributors like Dice. These are all pretty similar situations. Money = power, and the more power you have, the more power you have, on and on until you control whatever it is.

You technically have some choice, but your route, your band, your internet, your cell phone carrier, your search engines…a lot of them have pretty much cornered a huge share of the market through power brokering/lobbying/VCs funding them. Look at ride shares. VCs drove the price down by operating at a loss for like a decade+. And now that they took over the market, they have all the power.

Your problem isn’t with the bands trying to make a living. It’s with capitalism.