I'm going to give a controversial counter-example. Ticketmaster itself is actually a really good product. It is just so overpriced and is an example of a "true monopoly", a far stronger example of a monopoly than the current Google anti-trust lawsuit.

I live in a mid-size metropolitan city. We are kind of a perfect size because we are a large enough city that most A-list celebs will actually stop here on tours (albeit near the end their tours or for 1-2 shows only). We also have some awesome minor league sports teams with enthusiastic fanbases, and we get lots of visits from large sports teams like NHL, NBA, etc in pre-season travel games. Anyway, the point being that forever, our stadium had some non-ticketmaster product to manage ticket buying. It was usually terrible. Tickets would get bought out from under you mid-purchase, reservations would get double-booked, finding available seats was clunky on a computer and almost impossible on a phone. The site was slow and burdensome and the tickets got emailed to you and needed to be printed out. On the flip side, our events were really cheap. We already paid lower-than average for these events and then our ticket fees were like a tier-based price of either $2 (tickets under $30), $4 (tickets under $80), or $6 (tickets over $80) depending on the pricing tier of the ticket.

That all changed last year. Ticketmaster came in and became the exclusive provider for our stadium. The change was dramatic. First of all, there was an awesome mobile app that works really well. It was modern and fast and made is very easy to find and reserve a seat. No more glitches with people buying the same tickets as you or failing during checkout. It was easy to find upcoming games or events and pre-buying was fast and efficient. Plus now we could sell unused season ticket games on the aftermarket (which wasn't possible before). A lot of boring ticket management features that used to require phone calls between 10am - 3pm (Mon-Thur) could now be done anytime on the app, day or night, even on weekends, and even hours before a game or event. You can also now buy last-minute tickets even after a game has started now because of Ticketmaster, which wasn't possible before. We had an NHL team come into town for a pre-season game and we could buy pre-order tickets super easy, and the previous year the website actually crashed when they opened up these tickets. Oh and my favorite feature now is being able to use contactless tickets through my Apple Wallet. Lines are shorter when we get to the stadium as a result and just an incredible improvement of quality of life for me and my family. So there are a ton of big benefits to Ticketmaster.

The downside is the fees. A lot of the tickets we buy are only $30-40. I routinely pay close to 50% in fees with ticketmaster when I previously was paying 5-10% in fees. And worse, I don't actually know or understand the fee structure at all. I've even asked employees and no one seems to know. As far as I can tell, they basically handed over the keys to the stadium, giving full responsibility of ticket management to TicketMaster and so everything from the website, the pre-orders, the season tickets, the aftermarket, mobile checkin, last minute auctions, are all just part of the package deal that Ticketmaster offers.

As a result, I used to pay $34 for a hockey or basketball game, and I now pay ~$65 for the exact same seat that I bought last year. The team doesn't get anymore money, the stadium doesn't seem to be either. My ticket prices are still the same until you get to the fees. Two years ago I could go to an event for under $100 all-in for my family of 3. Now it costs me about $200.

So I wanted to provide perspective on what Ticketmaster offers. They do offer a lot for stadiums, who truly aren't equipped to manage a distributed and scalable ticket management product. So there is value in what ticketmaster offers. But do they deserve to make as much as the artists or athletes that I am paying to see? Hell no, and that seems to be the current pricing model. So I want to see Ticketmaster competed with. The problem is that no one else seems to offer a product that comes close.

For anyone out there that wants to start a competitor, you just need to offer a package deal for stadiums. Ticketmaster offers an all-in-one deal for stadiums so they don't have to worry about any app or web development, maintenance, ticket sales, or anything else.

Remember stadiums are owned by corporate real estate. They just want to collect their rent and keep values high on property. They outsource all labor, food, and management of the events to different people. So for ticket sales they don't really care what Ticketmaster charges, they just like to hand over the keys and know that the job gets done and to them that means that butts are in seats. That's all they care about, because if the stadium stays filled, then rent stays high, good artists and sports want to play there, and they keep getting paid. If Ticketmaster can do that while charging 50% fees to customers, and the company that only charges 10% can't. Then Ticketmaster is getting the contract. That's how it works.

Ticketmaster has a good product, people need to acknowledge that. That is why the upstarts and startups fail. But we need to see competition here, because the fees are getting out of hand and that is a direct result to ticketmaster being a monopoly.