![]() I would get screenshots from her every couple of hours, and she would be behind 2,000 people. She never ended up with a ticket and spent the entire day in queues. ![]() But I will say my colleague was and had the most frustrating sales experience. ![]() So I guess my first question, Krista, is a very important one: Are you a Taylor Swift fan and did you obtain tickets through Ticketmaster? And you are also prepared to have to do it again and again.” “But when you go to Ticketmaster, you prepare for a horrible experience. If you have a bad restaurant experience, you leave because there’s 20 others that you can go to,” Brown told me. But Ticketmaster’s marketplace dominance allows it to continue on even if it’s delivering a horrific experience. Usually, a company doesn’t just go around upsetting its base with website crashes, absurd ticket pricing and fees, and being shut out of tickets consumer loyalty matters to most corporations. Artists face limits too, as many arenas and stadiums have Ticketmaster exclusivity deals wherein playing at a venue means using Ticketmaster as their vendor. Thanks to a web of exclusivity contracts with artists and venues, consumers usually have to go through Ticketmaster to see the artists they want to see. In 2019, Ticketmaster’s parent company Live Nation agreed to settle with the DOJ over antitrust violations and extend terms of its regulatory decree (basically, a set of antitrust agreements that the DOJ made Live Nation promise to abide by in order to allow the merger happen). This week, the New York Times reported that the Department of Justice is reportedly going to open an antitrust investigation into Ticketmaster. Brown explains that merger gave Ticketmaster a virtual monopoly over ticket-buying consumers, artists like Swift, and the venues where they play. It’s part of a coalition of organizations called “ Break Up Ticketmaster” that seeks to undo the 2010 merger between Ticketmaster and concert promotion company Live Nation. The AELP is a nonprofit, non-partisan organization that focuses on dismantling monopolies and lobbies to assert antitrust laws. Krista Brown, a senior policy analyst at the American Economic Liberties Project (AELP), explained to me, this Swift failure is a symptom of a bigger problem. ![]() Swift issued a statement on social media saying that she and her team asked Ticketmaster repeatedly if they could handle the volume and intensity of her fandom, and compared the ragged experience to “several bear attacks.” On the surface, the problem looks like a classic case of Ticketmaster not being able to keep up with the demand. Millions of devoted fans were shut out of buying tickets altogether. Ticketmaster said on November 17 that it would not even be selling tickets to the general public. The fans that got through - via a system of presale codes and designated purchase times - ran into numerous malfunctions, some being told to wait hours to be able to spend hundreds of dollars on seats. Over the past week, that giddy anticipation liquefied into bleak, resentful disappointment as tickets became increasingly difficult to purchase.Īccording to Ticketmaster, there were approximately 14 million users on the site at once during the presale push, and the company sold 2.4 million presale tickets. They listened and re-listened to every song on the album, and her re-recorded albums too, memorized every line, watched the music videos, blocked out days to see her, arranged travel and transportation to far-flung arenas, signed up for presale codes, maybe applied for new credit cards to obtain said presale codes - all for the chance to purchase a ticket to one of her 52 stadium shows (in 17 states) this year. Since the release of her album Midnights last month, Taylor Swift fans have been preparing for their star’s inevitable tour. There’s something deeply wrong in Taylor Swift’s America.
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