Taylor Swift vs. Ronald Reagan: The Ticketmaster story

So I basically spent an entire day trying to buy tickets to the Taylor Swift era's tour. And like millions of other people, I had a terrible experience doing it. How do you f*** up this badly? You knew this was coming, you knew how many people signed up for presale. Ticketmaster site wasn't equipped to handle all the demand and just kept crash.

我基本上花了一整天的时间尝试购买泰勒·斯威夫特时代巡演的门票。和数百万其他人一样，我做这件事时非常糟糕。你们怎么能这么糟糕？你们知道这件事即将发生，你们知道有多少人注册了预售。Ticketmaster 网站没有准备好处理所有的需求，只是一直崩溃。

People waited in the presale queue all day, only to get kicked out again. A few lucky people finally got to the front of the line, had tickets in their car, and then kicked out and had to start all over again. This happened to me. If you went through all this, you kind of know it was like playing the world's worst video game. And the prize for winning was getting to pay outrageous ticketmaster fees. Now the weird thing about this is that this is far from the first time that ticketmaster has failed in this way.

人们在预售队列中等了一整天，最终又被踢出队列。有些幸运的人最终排到了最前面，已经有门票在他们的车里，但还是被踢出了队列，不得不重新开始等待。这种事情也发生在我身上。如果你经历了这一切，你就会知道这就像是玩世界上最烂的视频游戏，而赢得的奖品是支付天价的Ticketmaster费用。奇怪的是，这并不是Ticketmaster第一次出现这种失败。

Everyone's unhappy with ticketmaster, but it still controls over 70% of the market for ticketing. In fact, it's had over 80% of the market for primary ticketing. That's the first sale of tickets since 1995. So how did ticketmaster become the dominant market leader when it's frustrating and loaded with exorbitant fees at best and utterly incompetent at worst?

每个人都对Ticketmaster不满意，但它仍然控制着超过70%的票务市场。事实上，自1995年以来，它已经占据了超过80%的一手票务市场份额。那么，在最好情况下，Ticketmaster为什么会成为主导市场领导者，并且满载昂贵的费用，而在最坏情况下则完全无能呢？

The answer, of course, is Ronald Reagan. This is DeCoder. We've got a special episode today. We're diving deep on Taylor Swift, ticketmaster, and how a handful of policy changes in the 1980s led to one firm so thoroughly dominating the live events of business in the United States. That Congress held a hearing in 2023 because Taylor Swift fans were so upset about antitrust law.

答案当然是罗纳德·里根。我是DeCoder。今天我们推出了一期特别节目，深入探讨泰勒·斯威夫特、票务公司Ticketmaster，以及20世纪80年代的一系列政策变化，如何导致一家公司如此彻底地主导美国现场活动业务。到2023年，美国国会因为泰勒·斯威夫特的粉丝对反垄断法感到非常不满而举行了听证会。

Here's a really simple version. In 1890, Congress passed the Sherman Antitrust Act, and President Theodore Roosevelt ran around using it to break up a bunch of monopolies. In 1914, Congress clarified the Sherman Act with the Clayton Act, which specifically prohibits anti-competitive mergers. And up until the 80s, this was all working. The government was pretty aggressive about breaking up monopolies.

这是一个非常简单的版本。1890年，国会通过了谢尔曼反托拉斯法，西奥多·罗斯福总统运用此法瓦解了一些垄断企业。1914年，国会通过克雷顿法对谢尔曼法进行了明确解释，这一法律专门禁止反竞争性合并。直到80年代，这一切都在起作用。政府对瓦解垄断持相当激进的态度。

But in 1978, law school professor Robert Pwork writes a book called The Antitrust Paradox, which essentially says we've been doing antitrust all wrong. His argument is that big companies often become big because they're good at what they do. And because being so big makes them efficient, that means people will eventually pay lower prices.

然而在1978年，法学教授罗伯特·普沃克写了一本名为《反垄断悖论》的书，其基本观点是我们一直以来都在错误地进行反垄断。他的论点是，往往大公司之所以变得大是因为他们擅长于自己所做的事情。同时，这些大公司由于规模效应所具备的高效率，意味着人们最终会支付更低的价格。

Now, here in 2023, I think we all know how well that worked out, but put your mind back in 1978. This idea is like exciting and fresh. So Bork says a company shouldn't be broken up just because it's big. And antitrust law should actually protect companies who win in the market and become big based on their superior ability. So Bork proposed a new approach to antitrust law, which he called the Consumer Welfare Standard. He said that courts and federal agencies like the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission should look out for the consumer welfare, which he mostly measured by prices.

现在，到了2023年，我认为我们都知道这个想法实际效果如何，但让我们回到1978年。那时，这个想法听起来很令人兴奋、创新。所以，博克说一家公司不应该因为规模太大而被拆分。反垄断法实际上应该保护在市场中赢得成功、基于其卓越能力而变得强大的公司。因此，博克提出了一种新的反垄断法方法，他称之为“消费者福利标准”。他说法院和联邦机构，如司法部和联邦贸易委员会，应该关注消费者福利，其大多数由价格来衡量。

What that means for us is that unless a monopoly causes an increase in prices, it's okay. And that's the Bork philosophy. Let the big businesses get big and stay big as long as they don't harm consumer welfare. In 1979, the Supreme Court decides a reader versus sonnetone. In that decision, the court officially endorsed Bork's claim that Congress had actually intended to adopt the Consumer Welfare Standard when it wrote the first antitrust law in the 19th century.

这对我们的意义在于除非垄断导致价格上涨，否则没有问题。这就是博克的哲学。只要大企业不损害消费者的福利，就让它们变得更大并保持长久。 1979年，最高法院在读者诉桑尼通案件中做出了裁决。在这个裁决中，法院正式支持了博克的声明，即当立法者在19世纪起草第一部反垄断法时，实际上意图采用“消费者福利标准”。

Again, the Consumer Welfare Standard is not actually in these laws. Bork just managed to convince everyone that he could read Teddy Roosevelt's mind. And this is what old Teddy bear wanted. It's kind of incredible. Anyway, Bork and the Chicago School are in vogue from the 1980s on. And really, they're still how we think of antitrust law today.

“消费者福利标准”实际上并没有在这些法律中出现。Bork只是设法说服每个人他能够读懂 Teddy Roosevelt 的想法。这就是早先的 Teddy bear 想要的。这有些令人难以置信。无论如何，从1980年代开始，Bork和芝加哥学派开始流行起来。实际上，他们仍然是我们今天思考反垄断法的方式。

In 1980, Ronald Reagan is elected president. Reagan and his team are big fans of Robert Bork in the Chicago School. Well, as that matter, here's Sundeep Fahecin, legal director at the open market since the two. President Reagan was really a key figure in the history of antitrust. He remade antitrust in some major ways by doing two things. First, he appointed Chicago School lawyers and economists to leave the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission, which are the two main public enforcers of federal antitrust law. These officials had a very different view of antitrust than their predecessors. By this point, the Supreme Court has already started adopting Bork's ideas. They believed antitrust should be exclusively about consumer welfare, which they described as low prices, high output.

1980年，罗纳德·里根当选总统。里根及其团队是芝加哥学派法学大师罗伯特·博克的铁杆粉丝。Sundeep Fahecin是自由市场开放组织的法律主管，他在接受采访的时候提到：“里根总统在反垄断历史上起到了关键作用。他通过两个重大举措在某种程度上改变了反垄断政策。首先，他任命了芝加哥学派的律师和经济学家领导司法部和联邦贸易委员会，这两个机构是联邦反垄断法的两个主要执行机构。这些官员对反垄断政策的看法与前任有很大不同。到这个时候，最高法院已经开始采纳博克的想法。他们认为反垄断政策应该完全关注消费者福利，即低价格，高产量。”

Second, they adopted a new set of economic assumptions about different business practices. For example, mergers and acquisitions were historically seen as principally a way of concentrating power and fewer and fewer hands, and generally not producing any offsetting public benefits. Reagan administration flipped that and said, actually mergers are generally good. So, Bork actually cast such a spell on Reagan that Reagan actually nominated him to be on the Supreme Court. And that nomination failed, in part, because Bork's videotape rental history was leaked to the press, which eventually led to a federal law making your video rental history private. This is true. It's also where the term Bork comes from, the 80s.

其次，他们采用了一组新的经济假设来反映不同的商业实践。例如，合并和收购在历史上通常被视为集中权力和减少公共利益的方式，通常不会产生任何相应的公共益处。里根政府颠覆了这一观点，并认为合并通常是好的。所以，波克实际上在里根身上施了魔法，里根最终提名他加入最高法院。这次提名失败部分原因是因为波克的录像出租记录被泄露给媒体，最终导致了一项联邦法律，使您的录像出租历史记录成为私人信息。这是真的。这也是80年代产生“波克化”一词的来源。

Tick-A-Master was started in 1976, but the modern era of Tick-A-Master kicks off in 1982. That's when the Pritzker family acquires a dominant stake in Tick-A-Master. They become the dominant shareholders and bring in a new CEO named Fred Rosen, and the company focuses on software for the computerized Tick-A-Business. His sales team went around to all of the venues and said to them, what would you think if we doubled the service fees? And they said, why would we want to do that? It's going to discourage people from buying tickets. And what Tick-A-Master said was, well, if we do it, we'll share the revenues from this new elevated service fee. This fee sharing arrangement is how Tick-A-Master is able to compete with its main competitor at the time, a company called Tick-A-Tron. It starts poaching Tick-A-Trons of Enu clients, and by 1991, Tick-A-Master just goes ahead and acquires Tick-A-Tron. So when Tick-A-Master acquired Tick-A-Tron, they would direct competitors to win the same industry and hence that is a form of horizontal integration. Did you hear that concept? When a company buys a direct competitor, that's called horizontal integration. This is important because later, Tick-A-Master is going to use some vertical integration as well, but we'll get to that.

Tick-A-Master成立于1976年，但现代Tick-A-Master的时代始于1982年。那一年，普里兹克家族获得了Tick-A-Master的主导股份。他们成为了主要股东，并聘请了一位名叫弗雷德·罗森的新CEO，公司专注于电脑化的Tick-A-Business软件。销售团队走遍了所有场馆，向他们说，如果我们将服务费翻倍，你们会怎么想？他们说，为什么我们要这样做？这将会让人们不愿意购买门票。Tick-A-Master说，如果我们这样做，我们会分享这个新的提高服务费的收入。这种收费共享安排是Tick-A-Master能够与当时的主要竞争对手Tick-A-Tron竞争的原因。它开始从Tick-A-Tron的客户中捕获人才，并在1991年，Tick-A-Master就直接收购了Tick-A-Tron。因此，当Tick-A-Master收购Tick-A-Tron时，他们是同一行业的直接竞争对手，这是一种横向整合。你听到这个概念了吗？当一个公司收购一个直接竞争对手时，这被称为横向整合，这很重要，因为后来，Tick-A-Master也会使用一些纵向整合，但我们会稍后讨论。

There's immediately a strong concern about abuse of market power. Does this eliminate competition, and whenever we have elimination of competition, that may harm consumers because suddenly there's not another competitor around who could lower prices, who could offer better service, who could offer better quality? Okay, so now it's the mid-90s. In 1995, Tick-A-Master.com launches. And throughout the rest of the 90s and early 2000s, Tick-A-Master slowly gains more and more power. It launches in an increasing number of countries around the world and inks partnerships for Ticket Resil with the NFL, the NHL, and the NBA. It even tickets the Olympics. In 2001, Tick-A-Master strikes a deal with Clear Channel Entertainment, which is now called Live Nation, to ticket their events. Clear Channel, or Live Nation, by this time was becoming America's largest concert promoter.

这段话表达了对市场垄断的担忧。一旦竞争被消除，就可能伤害消费者，因为没有其他竞争对手能够降低价格、提供更好的服务、提供更好的质量。到了90年代中期，Ticket-A-Master.com在1995年推出。在接下来的几年中，它逐渐获得更多的市场，进军全球越来越多的国家，并与NFL、NHL和NBA签订门票销售伙伴关系，甚至售卖奥运会门票。2001年，Ticket-A-Master与Clear Channel Entertainment（现在称为Live Nation）达成了一项合作协议，成为当时美国最大的音乐会促销商。

That's the marketing for a concert, basically filling seats. But Live Nation also owns and manages the concert venues. So it really owns the whole live event pipeline. And in the 2000s, as Music Piracy upends the industry, big artists start signing massive exclusive deals with Live Nation. So by 2007, Live Nation has a bunch of exclusive deals with huge artists, ownership of most major venues, and a lock on the concert promotion business. So then they did the next natural thing. They started working on a ticketing business to compete with Ticket Master.

这是一场音乐会的营销，通常是填充座位。但是Live Nation也拥有和管理音乐会场地。因此，它实际上拥有整个现场活动的流水线。在2000年代，音乐盗版颠覆了该行业，大型艺术家开始与Live Nation签订大规模的独家协议。因此，到了2007年，Live Nation与众多重要艺术家签订了独家协议，拥有大多数主要场馆的所有权，并锁定了音乐会推广业务。于是，他们开始着手开展售票业务，以与Ticket Master竞争。

So that brings us to 2010. And now it's time to talk about vertical integration, which gets even less scrutiny than horizontal integration. Here's for you. And then the extreme case, of course, is a vertical monopoly where at all points of the value chain, there's only a single provider. And so that would of course give that player a tremendous amount of market power because not only are they the only seller, but they also the only buyer, and they're controlling all of the inputs that are happening along this value chain. 2010, Ticket Master and Live Nation decide to merge and form live nation entertainment.

这就带我们到了2010年。现在是时候谈论垂直整合了，这比水平整合更少受到关注。这里是为你说的。当然，极端情况是垂直垄断，也就是整个价值链中只有一个供应商。这当然会给那个玩家带来巨大的市场力量，因为他们不仅是唯一的卖家，还是唯一的买家，控制着整个价值链上发生的所有输入。2010年，Ticket Master和Live Nation决定合并并组建Live Nation Entertainment。

So Ticket Master, which sells tickets, decides to merge with Live Nation, which owns venues and puts on and promotes concerts. A lot of people think this created an unfair vertical monopoly, and the deal should have been stopped by the Obama administration. A handful of states actually sued over the Ticket Master Live Nation deal as did the Justice Department. In order for the deal to go through, Ticket Master promised the Department of Justice it wouldn't do anything anti-competitive. It was basically just a pinky swear. It's pretty hard to enforce. The company was forced to sell one of the toldings, another Ticket company to a rival firm, and it promised to license its ticketing software to another rival called AEG, which is a big promoter and competitor to Live Nation.

售票公司Ticket Master与拥有场馆、举办和推广音乐会的Live Nation决定合并。许多人认为这创造了不公平的垂直垄断，此交易应该被奥巴马政府禁止。一些州实际上已经对Ticket Master和Live Nation的合并提起诉讼，司法部也同样如此。为了交易能够完成，Ticket Master承诺司法部不会采取任何反竞争措施，其实就是一个小小的承诺。这很难实施。公司被迫将其中一个公司出售给一家竞争公司，同时承诺将其售票软件授权给竞争对手AEG使用，这是Live Nation的一大竞争对手。

The terms of the Live Nation merger established by the DOJ lasted until 2019 when they were reviewed. We talked about that with Dean Budnik. And in 2019, the government decided to renew that consent decree, essentially giving permission to this merger, and there hadn't been a dramatic change in terms of market dominance by Ticket Master between those two periods of time. So at least the Department of Justice has examined this issue twice, but on two separate occasions, the government has opted not to step in and do anything.

美国司法部对Live Nation合并的条款规定持续到2019年进行审查。我们与迪恩·布德尼克进行了交谈。2019年，政府决定续签同意书，基本上批准了这一合并，并且在这两个时期之间，Ticket Master的市场主导地位没有发生显著变化。因此，至少司法部已经两次审查了这个问题，但在两个不同的场合里，政府选择不采取任何行动。

So that brings us to today. Ticket Master and its parent company Live Nation Entertainment dominate the market for live concerts. Live Nation's dominance of ticketing and promotion has allowed it to shut out competitors. Jack Grovesinger, the CEO of SeatGeek, talked about this at the January hearing as well. He claimed that when venues switched to SeatGeek or another Ticket Master competitor for the ticketing, Live Nation, which controls the artists and their promotion, stops giving concerts to those venues.

那么这就带我们来到今天。Ticket Master及其母公司Live Nation Entertainment主导着现场音乐会市场。在售票和宣传方面，Live Nation的主导地位使其能够挤掉竞争对手。SeatGeek公司的CEO杰克·格罗文辛格也在1月份的听证会上谈到了这一点。他声称，当场馆转向SeatGeek或另一家Ticket Master的竞争对手时，掌控艺人和他们宣传的Live Nation就会停止为这些场馆举办演唱会。

One case, the a Live Nation president told the venue that they would quote unquote go nuclear if they left. So the threat is real, it's been documented, it happens. With Ticket Master's growing dominance and lack of meaningful competition, Ticket prices and the fees that accompany them have drastically increased. Where this could see even deeper is that lots of people resell their tickets. And Ticket Master has a big chunk of that market too.

有个案例，一位Live Nation总裁告诉场馆，如果他们离开的话，他们将会“核打击”（使用强硬手段）。所以这个威胁是真实存在的，已经被记录下来，确实发生了。随着Ticket Master的日益垄断和缺乏有意义的竞争，门票价格和附随的费用已经大幅上涨。更深入的问题是，许多人会重新出售他们的门票，而Ticket Master也拥有这个市场的大部分份额。

If you try and use another service like StubHub to buy a ticket that Ticket Master originally sold, you still need to have a Ticket Master account and enter their ecosystem. So now they have your data even if you didn't want to interact with them in the first place. A couple of senators at the hearing also had some thoughts about how to regulate Ticket Master into working better. Basically the government redesigning Ticket Master to make it friendlier for consumers. I guess that's one way to do it.

如果你尝试使用StubHub等其他服务购买Ticket Master原本销售的门票，你仍然需要拥有Ticket Master账户并进入他们的生态系统。因此，即使你一开始不想与他们互动，他们仍然拥有你的数据。在听证会上，一些参议员也对如何监管Ticket Master以使其更好地工作有了一些想法。基本上是使政府重新设计Ticket Master，使其对消费者更友好。我想这是一种方法。

The other way is to have a more competitive market. SeatGeek is another primary ticketing site that has struggled to compete with Ticket Master. Ditto for Event Right and StubHub. In our reporting for the story, we also talked to Russ Tannen, president of DICE, a venture-backed Ticketing startup. DICE has made its ticket non-transferable. There's a QR code with your ticket that appears right before the event to prevent scalping.

另一种方法是推动更有竞争力的市场。SeatGeek是另一个主要的售票网站，一直在努力与Ticket Master竞争。Event Right和StubHub也是如此。在我们为这篇报道的采访中，我们还与创业企业票务公司DICE的总裁Russ Tannen进行了交谈。DICE使其门票不可转让。活动前，门票上会出现一个QR码，以防止倒卖。

But in a functional market, some artists would choose to use DICE's system that doesn't allow resale. Someone used TicketGeek and some would still use Ticket Master. And all of them would compete to build the fair system that made fans the happiest. Without that competition, a lot of the things that Ticket Master would have to do to not suck requires the company to make decisions that no publicly traded company with a responsibility to its shareholders could reasonably make. Ticket Master would have to increase the cost of app development and servers while limiting the profits from all those fees.

在一个有功能性的市场中，一些艺术家可能会选择使用DICE的系统，因为该系统不允许转售。有些人可能会使用TicketGeek，有些人则仍然使用Ticket Master。而且，他们都会竞争构建让粉丝最满意的公平系统。如果没有这种竞争，Ticket Master将不得不做出一些使公司不那么糟糕的决定，而这些决定任何股票上市公司都无法合理地做出。Ticket Master将不得不增加应用程序开发和服务器的成本，同时限制所有这些费用的利润。

And that's just not going to happen unless something makes it happen. And that means there's only two choices. We can accept the Ticket Master as a monopoly and have a bunch of weirdos in Congress trying to regulate it directly. Or we can figure out how to inject some more competition into the market so Ticket Master makes better choices just to stay in the game. See, it would work and Reagan didn't think about when they re-wrote Antitrust law is that when companies get so big they have no competition. They have no more incentive to be good.

那只有在有所推动的情况下，这种情况才有可能发生。这意味着只有两种选择。我们可以接受Ticket Master 作为垄断，然后让一群怪人在国会尝试直接监管它。或者我们可以想办法在市场上注入更多竞争，这样Ticket Master 就会做更好的选择，以便继续保持竞争力。所以，当我们重新修改《反垄断法》时，里根没有考虑的是当公司变得如此庞大，没有竞争对手时，它们就没有更好的动力。

What they do. The new chair of the Federal Trade Commission is named Lena Kahn. She's written it length about the problem with Bork's approach. The current framework in Antitrust, the consumer welfare framework really fails to capture forms of market power and forms of dominance that should be relevant to Antitrust and do raise competition concerns. And there are other glimmers of help under the Biden administration. We're seeing some positive signs.

他们所做的事情。美国联邦贸易委员会的新主席名叫莉娜·卡恩。她详细阐述了博克的方法存在的问题。目前在反垄断领域的框架 - 消费者福利框架，无法真正捕捉到市场力量和垄断形式，而它们对反垄断至关重要，同时也引发了竞争方面的关注。在拜登政府下，还有其他带来帮助的闪光点。我们看到了一些积极的信号。

I think the Department of Justice has made reigning an employer power a key part of its enforcement program. They've gone after many managers and firms for engaging in wage fixing, no higher agreements, no poach agreements. But all that's easier said than done. Under Commissioner Kahn, the FTC has aggressively gone after Big Tech. But its first attempts at lawsuits have been busts. The court keeps knocking them down because they're just not agreeing with Kahn's new version of Antitrust. They're stuck in the consumer welfare standard.

我认为司法部将控制雇主权力作为其执法计划的关键部分。他们已经追查了许多经理和公司，因为他们参与了固定工资、禁止涨薪、禁止挖人的活动。但这都比说的容易。在康委员的领导下，FTC积极追击大型科技公司。但它的首次诉讼尝试却以失败告终。法院不断地否决他们，因为他们对康新版反垄断法的不认可。他们被困在消费者福利标准中。

There's another problem of tack going on over at the Biden Justice Department, which is investigating Ticketmaster and Live Nation, seemingly asking whether Live Nation Entertainment is a monopoly after all.

拜登司法部正在调查Ticketmaster和Live Nation，看起来是在质疑Live Nation Entertainment是否构成垄断。这又是拿不定主意的另一个问题。

Senator Klobuchar nudged the Justice Department to take action at the hearing. I know you, Ms. Bradyish, talked about this idea of spinning off companies. We've all seen that as a remedy that would most likely be coming from the Justice Department.

克洛布彻参议员在听证会上敦促司法部采取行动。我知道，布雷迪什女士，您谈到了拆分公司的想法。我们都知道，这很可能是司法部要采取的一种解决方案。

So all we can do here is put forward the evidence and these are sworn testimonies back and forth under law so that the Justice Department can look at this discussion. It seems like all this pressure forced Ticketmaster to at least do a little better with Beyoncé's upcoming tour.

在这里，我们所能做的就是提供证据，这些证据都是根据法律要求交换的宣誓证言，以便司法部门可以查看这些讨论。看起来所有这些压力至少迫使Ticketmaster在Beyoncé即将开始的巡回演唱会上表现得更好了一点。

But the underlying problems are all still there. So we'll see if the Swifties can push the Department of Justice into breaking up Ticketmaster and Live Nation. Anything's possible. And we'll see if Congress does anything to update our Antitrust laws.

但是根本问题仍然存在。所以我们要看看Swifties是否能推动司法部拆分Ticketmaster和Live Nation。一切皆有可能。我们还要看看国会是否会采取措施更新我们的反垄断法。

But in the meantime, the question we should all be asking ourselves is, do we want to live in the borg Reagan world of weird regulated monopolies, or do we want these companies to actually compete?

与此同时，我们应该问自己的问题是，我们想生活在雷根式的奇怪管制垄断世界中，还是想让这些公司真正地竞争？

I should be the king of America. Let's just go up a little bit more. There's our end to court.

我应该是美国的国王。让我们再往上走一点点。那里是我们的终点法院。

The Patel. Hey everybody, this was the short video version of this episode of Decoder that's a podcast I host. If you want the full episode, go anywhere you get your podcasts and look for Decoder.

嘿，各位，这是“解码器”播客的短视频版本，我是主持人Patel。如果你想要完整的集数，请在任何你获得播客的地方搜索解码器。