Sort of. Ticketmaster buys some venues (as LiveNation), and acquires exclusive online-ticket-sale rights to others. They enable this by pouring profit from fees into the venues (either to fund purchases or to afford licensing).
The result isn't greedy venues letting TicketMaster take the heat - if that were the case box office tickets wouldn't be so much cheaper. Instead, it's TicketMaster/LiveNation using venue lock-in to prevent artists from escaping their tendrils. There are some bands that have explicitly attempted to avoid using TicketMaster, and what they usually find is that it becomes very hard to find venues. In smaller cities/towns, it's often the case that there are no large non-TicketMaster theaters, so you can either feed the beast or abandon your fans in that location.
(So in a very indirect sense, TicketMaster is hiding behind zoning/licensing laws and that's why it can offer such anti-competitive pricing.)
It's more complicated than that and has nothing to do with zoning at all. TicketMaster aggressively seeks out venues and lands exclusive contracts, which is a model that makes sense for many venues.
They buy venues and operators/promoters. Some of these "facility" fees are really just payments going into the promoter/operators pockets. In many cases, those people are TicketMaster.
I mention the zoning thing only to explain why you can't push "just open a competitor" one level deeper and create your own vertically-integrated competitor - most regions have an essentially fixed number of major venues, so getting 100% buy-in is totally possible.
But yeah, it's not the proximate cause. That's just vertical control of the market, where TM took over online sales for people who needed a POS service for the web, then merged with LN to get control over promotion and venue operation (which among other things means that many box offices charge fees that get passed on to TM).
>which is a model that makes sense for many venues.
This is the point that so many people miss about Ticketmaster. The customer is the venue and not the ticket purchaser. For the venue, there is no one who offers as complete a package of services as Ticketmaster. They provide so much more than the consumer facing ticket sales website that is the only piece of Ticketmaster that most fans see.
They're ruthless in competing for that business too.
I worked for a startup years ago that got traction with its ticketing solution for certain markets which eventually brushed against TicketMaster. TM was distracted at the time with .com gold rush stuff, and we had traction. They ended up buying the company at a really high premium. A real rarity at the time.
The result isn't greedy venues letting TicketMaster take the heat - if that were the case box office tickets wouldn't be so much cheaper. Instead, it's TicketMaster/LiveNation using venue lock-in to prevent artists from escaping their tendrils. There are some bands that have explicitly attempted to avoid using TicketMaster, and what they usually find is that it becomes very hard to find venues. In smaller cities/towns, it's often the case that there are no large non-TicketMaster theaters, so you can either feed the beast or abandon your fans in that location.
(So in a very indirect sense, TicketMaster is hiding behind zoning/licensing laws and that's why it can offer such anti-competitive pricing.)