Ticketmaster needs regulation and cleanup An open plea to President Barack Obama

June 17 President Barack Obama called for a sweeping financial regulations package. How about starting with Ticketmaster, Mr. President?

For years it has been the bane of an industry that brings in billions upon billions each year. Nearly $4-billion according to Forbes, which also reduced Miley Cyrus annual income by 600 percent in its recent most influential celebrities – where does that magazine get its information? I think they pull it out of their place where like opinions, we all have one.

This week I purchased, ironically, Miley Cyrus tickets. The ticket was $39. The final Ticketmaster price was nearly $65, a 25 percent markup for a computer to handle the transaction.

Mr. President – this is as big an injustice as all those years GM (either Government or General Motors) made all those gross, huge profits that were fanfared by soon to be defunct magazines like Time and Newsweek as great. While GM was blindly stealing from U.S. citizens, Japanese car companies made inroads in the U.S. market in the ‘80s by offering not-so overpriced cars – cars at a lower price. GM and Chrysler are now like your rich uncle who won that $200-million dollar lottery but blew all the money at strip clubs and now wants us to support him.

Let’s say, for conservative estimates, concert revenues in this nation are $6-billion per year. That leaves roughly $1.5 billion a year to Ticketmaster. Mr. President, why should a company receive $1.5-billion for a computer system? Couldn’t the country’s nearly 300-billion citizens, with at least 30 percent of concert and sports going public, use that money to spend in our economy rather than giving it to Ticketmaster?

Please, President Obama, regulate Ticketmaster like you did the banks and GM.

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Addendum - 10 minutes after writing this story, I hand an attack of what a sloppy reporting job I did. I estimated Ticketmaster's earnings on Marketing Sociologist projections of the concert industry's estimated revenue and how much Ticketmaster would take of that.

Turns out Ticketmaster IS a publicly traded company. According to Hoovers.com, Ticketmaster's annual revenue? $1.46-billion. That's why you need Marketing Sociologist to help you increase your company's revenue. Look at the accuracy with a guess-timate. Image the profits your company is missing by not utilizing this revolutionary new field of profit-making!