There is no denying that Taylor Swift is currently one of the biggest artists on the planet. So when she announced her ‘Eras Tour’ containing songs from all her albums and eras, it was not surprising that tickets sold out extremely quickly. However, unexpectedly during the presale, Ticketmaster crashed, people queued for hours, and the organisers cancelled the general sale for tickets.
With resale tickets going for prices as high as $22,000, understandably Swift’s fans, or as they like to be called ‘Swifties’, were going through emotions, from sadness to anger to joy if they were one of the few that somehow managed to get a ticket in their version of the Hunger Games.
How did this happen? Ticketmaster explained that it was “due to extraordinarily high demands on ticketing systems and insufficient remaining ticket inventory to meet that demand.” However, like always, there is more to the story than that. The presale was only supposed to be open to 1.5 million fans who had applied to become ‘verified’ Swifties. But when the time came, there were 14 million people, including bots and resellers, all fighting for the tickets as if they were gold dust.
As Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez reminded us, Ticketmaster is a monopoly. In 2010, Ticketmaster merged with venue operator Live Nation and now holds a monopoly over tickets and venues, especially in America, controlling 70% of the market. The company also has a history of buying up its competitors, thus leaving fans with nowhere else to buy tickets to their favourite concerts other than the seemingly corrupt Ticketmaster.
A group of Swifties with experience in industries such as law have come together to create Vigilante Legal, combining their skills to try and bring Ticketmaster down to improve fan experiences. While there is no immediate answer to make buying your tickets easier, supporting groups like Vigilante Legal may help to speed up the process. And as far as Ticketmaster themselves are concerned, they need to work to cap prices of resale tickets, preferably at face value and improve they're already existing ‘anti-bot technology’ to ensure it’s the real Swifties getting the tickets.
Edited by Jemma Snowdon