Ticket sales for Taylor Swift’s upcoming tour haven’t gone up, but in the words of the chart-topping singer, all is well.
Mixed messages, long wait times, and temporary outages on the Ticketmaster website left fans frustrated and empty-handed as the first wave of tickets for next year’s 52-date Eras tour and Swift’s first since 2018 went on sale.
Ticketmaster rescheduled additional rounds due to what it called “historically unprecedented demand”, with “millions” trying to buy pre-sale tickets and hundreds of thousands successfully doing so.
On Thursday afternoon, the day before tickets were to open to the public, it announced that the sale had been canceled entirely due to “extraordinarily high demand on the ticketing system and insufficient ticket inventory to meet that demand”.
The frenzy has brought renewed scrutiny to the giant Ticketmaster, which critics have long accused of abusing its market power at the expense of consumers. Concertgoers have complained of near-instant sellouts and skyrocketing prices at recent events, and artists like Pearl Jam and Bruce Springsteen have struggled with it for decades.
A common complaint is that Ticketmaster doesn’t seem like a clear alternative or competitor, especially after it merged with concert provider Live Nation in 2010 (a controversial move that required conditional approval from the US Department of Justice).
Now Tennessee’s attorney general, a Republican, is opening a consumer protection investigation into the incident and Democratic lawmakers are asking questions about the company’s dominance — not for the first time.
Ticketmaster did not respond to NPR’s request for comment, but released a statement Thursday titled “The Taylor Swift On Sale Explained.”
“Taylor Swift’s tour sales are a perfect example of how the Live Nation/Ticketmaster merger harmed consumers by creating a near-monopoly,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), one of several lawmakers who have long called for an investigation. responsibility in the company, especially after becoming a subsidiary of concert behemoth Live Nation.
And he took some inspiration from Swift’s lyrics: “Consumers deserve better than this anti-hero behavior.”
Lawmakers have long been skeptical of Ticketmaster’s ‘reputation’
Various Democratic lawmakers have called for major antitrust enforcement over the years, including in April 2021 and most recently in March of this year, asking the Justice Department to investigate competition conditions in the ticketing market.
Some want to hear directly from Ticketmaster — including Sen. Amy Klobuchar, chair of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Competition Policy, Antitrust, and Consumer Rights.
Klobuchar announced Thursday that she had sent a letter to Ticketmaster President and CEO Michael Rapinoe expressing concerns about the lack of competition and questioning some of the company’s practices.
“Ticketmaster’s strength in the primary ticket market insulates it from the competitive pressures that typically push companies to innovate and improve their services,” she wrote. “This could lead to the types of dramatic service failures we saw this week, where consumers pay the price.”
Ticketmaster was only able to merge Live Nation under the antitrust consent decree, with certain conditions to prevent it from abusing its market position. Citing several complaints, Klobuchar expressed concern about the “pattern of compliance” with those legal obligations.
She asked Rapino to provide written answers to a set of five questions by Wednesday, including how much the company has invested in upgrading its systems to handle the surge in demand, what percentage of high-profile tour tickets are generally available to the public, and what. It is aware of any complaints to government agencies about non-compliance in the last 12 months.
Klobuchar also noted that his concerns go back much further than that.
“I have been suspicious of the combination of these companies since the merger in 2011 when the Senate held hearings on the merger,” she wrote. “At that hearing, you appeared as a witness and promised to ‘develop an easy-to-access, one-stop platform that can deliver … tickets.’ And you said you were confident the plan would work. It seems your confidence was misplaced.”
Critics don’t want Ticketmaster to ‘shake it up’
Several Democrat lawmakers turned to Twitter to air their bad blood against the company, with many calling it a monopoly and calling for change.
“A daily reminder that Ticketmaster is a monopoly, its merger with Live Nation should never have been approved, and they need to be governed,” wrote Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.). “Break them down.”
Rep. David Cicilline (D-R.I.), who chairs the House Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial and Administrative Law, described Ticketmaster’s wait times and fees as “symptoms of a larger problem.”
“It’s no secret that Live Nation-Ticketmaster is an unchecked monopoly,” he added.
Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-N.J.) wasted no time weighing in on the Swift fiasco.
“You’d think with their endless list of fees Ticketmaster might have a working website,” he tweeted Thursday, repeating comments he made Tuesday. “Live Nation-Break the Ticketmaster Monopoly.”
Ticketmaster says sales broke records – and its website
In a statement Thursday, Ticketmaster explained how it prepared for the pre-sale period, with 3.5 million people pre-registering for the Certified Fan program, the largest number in its history and which “informed the artist team’s decision to add additional dates” to the tour.
The company confirmed the use of fan invitation codes has historically helped manage the volume of users coming to the website to buy tickets, although that was not the case on Tuesday.
“A staggering number of bot attacks as well as fans without invite codes drove unprecedented traffic to our site, resulting in 3.5 billion total system requests – 4 times more than our previous peak,” it said, adding that this led to some sales and slowdowns. Others were pushed back to stabilize their system, resulting in long wait times for some users.
It estimates that about 15% of interactions on the website experience problems, which it calls “15% too many”. But it also said a record-breaking number of fans were able to buy tickets: More than 2 million were sold for Swift’s tour on Tuesday, the most for an artist in a single day.
Ticketmaster admits that in-demand sales pose technical challenges, and says that even if they didn’t, many fans would still be without tickets.
“For example: based on the amount of traffic to our site, Taylor needs to perform over 900 stadium shows (about 20x the number of shows she’s doing),” it said. “It’s a stadium show every night for the next 2.5 years.”
Ticketmaster’s largest shareholder appeared to blame Swift in an interview Thursday.
Gregg Maffi, CEO of Liberty Media, which owns the majority of Live Nation, told CNBC’s Squeak on the Street that the company sympathized with fans but the demand was overwhelming, which he suggested was due to the fact that Swift. Visited in five years.
“This is Taylor Swift’s act,” he said. “The site was supposed to open to 1.5 million verified Taylor Swift fans. We had 14 million people hit the site, including bots, that shouldn’t be there.”
Fans didn’t take kindly to that explanation if the outpouring of angry tweets was any indication. Swift has not publicly commented on the Ticketmaster fiasco, although a quick scan of her Instagram account shows that her bio still bears the lyrics to one of her latest hits: “I’m the problem, it’s me.”