I don't like going to concerts either, but that doesn't mean I think it's acceptable that people who want to are charged half their yearly income to go to one.
Utilities, healthcare, debt, education, foreign aid, environment, tech spyware, freedom of the Internet, insurrection. I got depressed and stopped listing things... I am happy for any kind of a win, but I stopped giving ticketmaster money in 2007. This is so overdue, it's only becoming a priority because Biden thinks he can win over swifties. It's hard to pretend that this should be a priority, at least free us from cable monopolies first.
Honestly, I care far more about untangling our rat's nest of NIMBY land use laws. As it stands, it's literally illegal to build anything denser than sprawling, low-density suburbs on the majority of urban land thanks to NIMBY policies such as restrictive zoning and arbitrary mandatory parking minimums.
Tbh, the whole "corporate ownership of homes" is a red herring. Shuffling around ownership does nothing if you're not massively expanding supply. And what we need most right now is massively expanded supply.
To add to this Science Vs did a podcast on the lack of affordable housing. It goes into the NIMBYs, the corporate ownership, local laws that make it hard to build multi-family units, and AirBnB. There are a lot of different factors and it might take time to see the results of fixing it because of this.
A red herring? Is there or is there not at least 1 housing unit per family that currently exists? My most recent understanding is we have enough quantity, just poor distribution.
When tickets first went on sale for her highly anticipated Eras Tour in November 2022, fans agonized over hours-long queues and frozen screens before Ticketmaster’s website ultimately crashed.
Ticketmaster’s failure to adequately prepare for that onslaught of demand by underinvesting in the customer purchase experience might have constituted an abuse of its market power, some economists pointed out.
“The Justice Department should have never cleared the [Live Nation-Ticketmaster] merger, because as a vertically integrated monopoly, they have every interest in encouraging prices and fees to go up, and there is no [one] in a position to discipline the industry, either by using an alternative promoter or ticketing agent,” said Tim Wu, a key architect of the Biden administration’s antitrust policies and a professor at Columbia Law.
Regardless of how the DOJ frames its lawsuit, it will have to show that Live Nation Entertainment has engaged in anti-competitive behavior that has stifled competition and hurt consumers by excessively raising prices or offering products of inferior quality.
Some experts, like Fiona Scott Morton, a professor at Yale School of Management and former chief economist at the DOJ’s antitrust division, think the government may have a strong case.
“Ticketmaster is pointing at the undeniable power of others to obscure its own monopolistic role in facilitating the extraordinary growth in both fees and also, to some extent, ticket prices,” Wu said.
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... Could we maybe focus on all the other things that are ludicrously high? Like hey... rent and/or housing prices? I could see some people being pissed if they thought their home value would go down, but fuck the damn rental companies charging sky-high "market rates" for shitty apartments that haven't been improved in over a decade.