To be sure, Live Nation owns and / or operates many of the venues. They also provide management services to artists. So it’s not that TicketMaster demands exclusivity from the venue, they #are# the venue.
And in court they will probably argue that this is vertical integration that creates savings they pass along to the consumer. DOJ will likely argue they are pocketing it.
If isn’t just vertical integration. It’s also abuse of monopoly power. I’m sure the DoJ won’t have any trouble showing how much market share TM/LN have.
I think the real issue is the limited supply of tickets to the most popular shows. Supply and demand dictates that the prices for these limited goods be very high, yet social norms discourage artists from charging the true market value for their tickets (fans will rebel against their favourite artist for perceived greed). So TM provides an effective reputation-laundering service to the artists and collects a hefty fee for it. If the DoJ were to win their case and succeed in breaking up the TM monopoly then I bet the extra revenue would go to some other ticket brokers, not to the artist or into consumers’ pockets.
It’s partly this but also the artists benefit in other ways from large strata of their fan base being able to attend live shows, but merch in person and mingle with each other. The venue and Ticketmaster only benefit from the ticket sales.
Scalpers are also a source of guaranteed sales, so you're diluting the risk of a concert because someone is already buying up all seats already for you and running the risk of not being able to sell them at a higher price later.
The Paramount Decrees way back in the 1940s/1950s: that's why Hollywood studios cannot produce movies and own the theaters which exhibit them. It's also similar to the (much more complex) reasons TV Service Providers (DirectTV, Spectrum, XFinity et. al) are separate from TV Networks, and why you don't see Disney trying to buy, say, DirectTV. Of course, streaming upended almost all of that.
> It’s also similar to the (much more complex) reasons TV Service Providers (DirectTV, Spectrum, XFinity et. al) are separate from TV Networks
Tell me more about how the “TV Service Provider” Xfinity (a subsidiary of Comcast) is separate from the various TV networks run by NBC Universal, LLC (a subsidiary of Comcast).
If you look at many older anti-trust cases from before 1970s, the bar for successful enforcement often seems unbelievably low when comparing it to how things are today. Take a look at this, for example: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/370/294/
But then there was a drastic change in approach to anti-trust during the Reagan era:
"Bork argues that the original intent of antitrust laws as well as economic efficiency makes consumer welfare and the protection of competition, rather than competitors, the only goals of antitrust law. Thus, while it was appropriate to prohibit cartels that fix prices and divide markets and mergers that create monopolies, practices that are allegedly exclusionary, such as vertical agreements and price discrimination, did not harm consumers and so should not be prohibited."
"From 1977 to 2007, the Supreme Court of the United States repeatedly adopted views stated in The Antitrust Paradox in such cases as Continental Television, Inc. v. GTE Sylvania, Inc., 433 U.S. 36 (1977), Broadcast Music, Inc. v. CBS, Inc., NCAA v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma, Spectrum Sports, Inc. v. McQuillan, State Oil Co. v. Khan, Verizon v. Trinko, and Leegin Creative Leather Products, Inc. v. PSKS, Inc., legalizing many practices previously prohibited."
A state government inhibiting that choice for minors, which is a well-established practice for all sorts of things. Alcohol consumption, tobacco, driving a car, voting in elections, gambling, and ability to enter into certain types of contracts, to name a few.
Men can't win. After centuries of being regarded as sex fiends who can't last nore than 2 minutes in bed, now "difficulty achieving orgasm" and "decreased libido" are considered dysfunctions.
English has "thou", which was the singular second person pronoun, and "you" which was the plural second person pronoun, but also used as a more formal, polite singular second person pronoun. Through a kind of formality inflation, everyone started using "you" all the time and abandoned "thou". Contemporary standard English doesn't have a plural second person pronoun, but needs one, and so "y'all" (or "ya'll") is being used now in some regions.
Not sure how my comment is “exactly backwards” — it’s logically consistent with your (new) comment. My point was that, relative to you, ye makes a case distinction (nominative), and that relative to you, thou makes a number distinction (glossing over formal/informal).
We deprecated ye and thou, but it’s the latter that “requires” y’all, because only thou (relative to us still having you) distinguishes the number of people.
Edit: put another way, “thou/thee is the one with number” meant that reintroducing them would create a number distinction.
There are a variety of documented undesirable side effects of heavy pornographic use [0],[1], including issues with mental health, sexual disfunction, and the ability to maintain normal romantic relationships.
It may be hard to stop, but that doesn’t mean there’s not a problem.
Skimming these, neither of those papers appears to document any demonstrable links. They're relying on self reporting in surveys and case studies that seems to produce what is at best correlation, potentially heavily biased by the self-reporting from people who at least judging by the case studies I skim appears to have to some degree self-diagnosed issues they may or may not have been right about.
I made a previous comment that I deleted because it was a bit sarcastic which doesn’t help the conversation. More seriously:
If you’re raising children, do you attempt to place safeguards in your family to prevent the potential outcomes discussed in the papers, or do you dismiss them because the correlations aren’t strong enough?
Never before in human history has the volume and type of pornography been so universally available. We’re in brand new territory here, and I think it’s worth paying attention to even self-reported anecdotes as the science is still being settled.
I dismiss them because there's literally decades worth of research into the effects of porn which to my knowledge has failed to come up with anything more than very minor effects, and when the best that's coming up now is some poorly constructed survey papers trying to infer things from self-reporting it's a strong indication there's nothing worth paying attention to, given the amount of effort and money that has been poured into it from groups with a strong interest in finding something.
If I trusted self-reported anecdotes I'd also seek to protect my family against ghosts, extra-terrestrial probing sessions and vengeful gods, among a long range of other risks I don't take seriously. If you can't provide evidence that gives a stronger indication of a damaging effect than that, I'll treat it the same way I threat those risks. If anything, if those studies are the best you can find it reassures me that the risks are near non-existent.
