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Well, the Taylor Swift thing is superficially silly—of course basic white girls aren’t entitled to socialized ticket prices.
But Ticketmaster/Live Nation is the vertically integrated nightmare monopoly that haunts anti-trust’s dreams. While it profoundly doesn’t matter, because it’s just concerts, having a conglomerate that controls ticket sales and owns the concert venues and manages the artists that play at those venues is really kind of a textbook example of an evil monopoly. It is really quite difficult to establish a fair market price and have competition when one company owns so much of the live music scene. They are also just shockingly incompetent, speaking from personal experience—I live near and attend events at 2 Live Nation venues, and their apps and websites are failure-prone pieces of shit that fall down on the very basics of keeping you logged in and showing available tickets. I just don’t know how such a large company has such a bad UX/UI experience…oh right, monopoly power, gotcha.
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Now on the Nvidia front…yeah, that’s just whining. These cards cost so much at launch because they cost so much to make. These are fabricated on TSMC’s absolute latest process, and it’s thought the masks alone cost $100 million to fabricate. The EUV systems to make these require huge amounts of power and have very low throughput, especially for GPUs, which are just big honkin’ slices of silicon, and require lots and lots of patterning passes. And there’s a whole mess of supply issues for all semiconductors right now…including obscure problems like a global shortage of neon, because something like 70% of the world’s neon is captured in Ukraine, for odd reasons.
I think the ticketmaster situation is ultimately a distraction. Fundamentally these tickets have their supply limited by the size of the venue. If there were multiple companies selling tickets to the same show it wouldn't change the fundamental problem that supply is lower than demand at prices considered "normal". I agree with OP. It's just entitled brats complaining.
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At one point, and for a long time, people thought Facebook was unassailable, shielded from competition because of its network effect. Then Apple flipped a switch while TikTok took off and down it goes. Gradually, and then suddenly, LN can suffer the same fate.
Moreover, American industry doesn't just stand by helplessly when there is extreme profit being made in an entire sector. LYV is valued at $17B; Elon Musk can buy it tomorrow. But perhaps he doesn't want to, because LYV had a net income of -$2B in 2020 and -$650mm in 2021. In 2019, before the pandemic, it made a paltry $70mm on $12B in revenue.
This is not the hallmark of some almighty puppeteering evil conglomerate that's inundated with money stolen from children with cancer. It may own lots of components in live entertainment, but the market sure doesn't value that ownership very highly.
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