I love going to concerts and love going to sport events. Ticketmaster is awful, but most of the ticketing platforms are. I always talked with fellow friends how we would love to start a new startup for this, for selling tickets, a fair one, etc. But of course people in the industry wouldn't want it. Really a shame, because it would be one of those cases where I'd be working on somethign that excites me so I would give it all.

Selling tickets is a really tough really low margin business with a ton of gatekeepers and risk.

First up you need to convince promoters to give you the tickets. Not artists. When an artist signs a deal with a promoter the promoter owns the tickets and can pretty much do what they want.

Problem is, a lot of good promoters in the US particularly are owned by Live Nation, which owns Ticketmaster.

That’s fine though - just work with promoters who aren’t owned by Live Nation! Only problem is the venues those promoters are hiring are owned by Live Nation.

Also, a bunch of artist management companies are owned by Live Nation too.

So if you want to sell tickets for shows in non-Live Nation affiliated venues for non-Live Nation affiliated artists that’s fine.

But those are going to be small shows with relatively unknown artists. The risk increases in inverse proportion to the size of the show and profile of the artist. The promoter you’re dealing with is going to want cash up front, so as the ticketing company you’re going to have to loan them the money. If they run or the show flops or whatever else you are left holding the can.

And because you’re tiny and dealing with unknown shows you’re never going to get allocation for big name shows, so you’re not going to be able to build a valuable list of consumers that you can cross sell shows to.

And for the shows you’re selling you’re going to be left with remnant inventory and so you need someone with good lists who can shift that for you. So you’ll probably end up giving Ticketmaster 30-40% of your allocation from the promoters you are working with.

There are established alternatives.

eTix is good. The quoted price for a show was $20. I wound up paying $21.65 after fees. The fees were obvious at checkout. I didn't have to sign up for anything or download an app, either (which I don't like about Dice, but they are similarly good otherwise).

The problem is mostly vertical integration & abusing a monopoly over venues of a certain size. I understand I live in a place where there are more independent venues than other places and I'm glad I happen to be into the acts that play them...

Not investable until Ticketmaster/Live Nation is broken up and the venues sold off.

I doubt you'd have much luck getting investors on board with a pitch that amounts to "we don't want to screw customers for additional profits"

But what do I know, I'm better with computers than people.

This startup already exists and is called Ticket Tailor. Although they have their faults, I think it will be very difficult for you to compete with them in that niche.