Swifties and lawmakers call for an end to Ticketmaster’s reign as ticket sales for The Eras Tour crash site
Many were left shorthanded when tickets for Swift's new tour went on sale yesterday
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Hell hath no fury like a Swiftie scorned. With yesterday’s presale for Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour, Ticketmaster saw an unprecedented demand for tickets for the 52 concert dates, leaving the site glitchy and shutting down in what became a tumultuous day for Swift fans. The widespread complications spurred legions of prospective buyers and even politicians to call for breaking up the ticket retailer.
“Daily reminder that Ticketmaster is a monopoly, it’s [sic] merger with LiveNation should never have been approved, and they need to be reigned in,” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wrote on Twitter. “Break them up.”
Other representatives such as New Jersey’s Bill Pascrell (who’s been a longtime opponent of the Live Nation-Ticketmaster merger), Minnesota’s Ilhan Omar, and Rhode Island’s David Cicilline echoed Ocasio-Cortez’s sentiment on social media.
Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal also took to Twitter to decry Ticketmaster’s monopoly, calling for a legal investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice.
“Taylor Swift’s tour sale is a perfect example of how the Live Nation/Ticketmaster merger harms consumers by creating a near-monopoly,” he writes. “I’ve long urged DOJ to investigate the state of competition in the ticketing industry. Consumers deserve better than this anti-hero behavior.”
With many fans left waiting hours for their shot to buy tickets, yesterday’s pre-sale for Swift’s tour has taken the conversation around the ever-expensive and competitive nature of buying concert tickets to new heights. It’s been a long building discussion, with every big tour (Adele, Harry Styles, Bruce Springsteen, Paramore, the list goes on and on) reprising complaints about Ticketmaster’s pricing and tiered access again and again.
Last month, President Joe Biden spoke on the exploitative nature of exorbitant processing fees for concert sales, stating that his administration is looking to bring an end to them.
Now if the Swifties can get the ball rolling before Beyoncé tickets go on sale, that would be great.
21 Comments
It would be the capitalist thing to do to encourage competition.*They will not.
Ticketmaster is one of the many reasons I hate going to massive shows, but now they own everybody else too so even little shows I have to use their shit ticketing system
The Arse Tour
Let them fight.
Pearl Jam shall be AVENGED!
Avenged Sevenfold shall be JAMMED!
Ben Folds shall be . . . Seven’ed!
Seven Mary Three shall be folded!
Mary J. Blige…has…three…names…
Nickelback will continue to get their nickels back!
NICKELBACK WILL GET THEIR PHOTOGRAPH LOOKED AT!
The fees are outrageous on Ticketmaster. There’s no getting around that. But how much of the anger is based not on THAT, but on the fact that it people had trouble buying the things in the first place? Something tells me that, if everyone who wanted a ticket was able to buy one in a reasonable amount of time with little hassle, the complaints would be a lot more muted.Why did all the dates have to go on sale at the same damn time? Is there an easier way to ensure that tickets to a 52-date stadium tour get sold in a fair manner? Should everyone have to stand in a physical (or phone) line, like when I as young?
I miss the days of standing in lines for tickets.
Good points. I’ll add on to it by pointing out that Ticketmaster should have known how many people were going to try to get tickets yesterday. It was a Verified Fans only pre-sale. So, you had to win a lottery just to be verified (I wasn’t, but my daughter was). So, it’s an enormous screw up on Ticketmaster’s part to not be able to handle crowd when they knew how big the crowd would be.
“an enormous screw up”Why spend money on marginal capacity you rarely need when in the cases you could apply it to there’s zero chance of losing revenue due to unsold product?
Yeah, it’s not as if some smaller ticket operation wouldn’t have crashed if millions of people were trying to buy tickets all at the same time. That seems to be what people are most pissed about. BUT… if it just gives us more reason to talk about the outrageous fees, fine by me. Even when you buy tickets at venue IN PERSON, you still get hit with a “convenience fee.” It’s ridiculous.
Yeah, convenient for THEM. Duh.
There is something to be said that Ticketmaster claims certain convenience fees etc are for the infrastructure used to buy tickets. So if you’re charging money to customers on other concerts that are supposed to ensure your website works and it doesn’t, there’s an argument that either the fees aren’t being used for that or the fees shouldn’t exist.Arguably, higher competition would mean a bigger push for infrastructure that works because if your site crashes then the artist will use another site instead next time that doesn’t crash.
That’s fair. I think as well that’s a big argument that there should be more competition in the industry. There should be consequences for charging people out the ass for convenience and then failing them so badly. Like, major artists use your competitor so their fans keep buying tickets.
I buy a lot of Broadway tickets and there does seem to be some spreading out by production team to different websites (Telecharge, Ticketmaster, SeatGeek). Lack of fees tends to be the big difference one to another.
> Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wrote on Twitter. “Break them up.”
Are we sure she wasn’t talking about NATO?