This Tuesday, November 15th presale tickets to Taylor Swifts eras tour went on sale and took over social media. In order to purchase tickets during the presale fans had to register to become a verified fan and receive a special code that gave you early access. Verified fan is created to ensure that real people get tickets over scalpers and bots and to lighten the load on website traffic for the general sale. However, in this case none of that occurred.
Taylor Swift fans who received the code still had terrible experiences trying to obtain tickets. Many fans reported waiting in the Ticketmaster line for over 8 hours. Ticketmaster even crashed during the process kicking thousands of people out of the queue and leaving them with no tickets after waiting all day. Additionally, tickets were supposed to sold from $49-$449 but now many fans are seeing the exact tickets they had in their cart before the site crashed being resold on ticket master for outrageous prices,
After the crash, Ticketmaster ended up having to move its pacific coast presale as well as its capitol One cardholder presale to Wednesday in order to lighten the amount of website traffic. Fans were furious about this as many had taken off work and already waited hours to get tickets and didn’t want to have to endure the process again another day.
This experience has caused many of people to question and criticize Ticketmaster, Ticketmaster is a huge monopoly and often goes unchecked. Fans who want tickets to events such as concerts, sporting events, and comedy shows are practically forced to use Ticketmaster, even though the platform tacks on ridiculous fees and has excessive wait times.
Senator, Amy K wrote a letter directly to Ticketmaster’s CEO saying how concerned she was with their quality of service and market power. She wrote, “Ticketmaster’s power in the primary ticket market insulates it from the competitive pressures that typically push companies to innovate and improve their services. That can result in the types of dramatic service failures we saw this week, where consumers are the ones that pay the price,” Klobuchar wrote.
About a decade ago Ticketmaster and Livenation merged together to make ticket buying an easy one stop shop for fans. Instead, we have seen that all it did was create a monopoly that goes unchecked. “Daily reminder that Ticketmaster is a monopoly, its merger with LiveNation should never have been approved, and they need to be reined in,” tweeted Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez after the Tuesday Eras tour outrage.
If i was working PR for Ticketmaster and Livenation. I would definitely consider coming out with a statement to this backlash. All they have managed to say so far if that they are sorry and that there were an “unprecedent amount of people trying to buy tickets” which fans of Taylor Swift are simply not responding well to. We have talked about the important of transparency in class, and I believe it would be best for Ticketmaster’s reputation to respond and ask for ways that their service could be improved. This would demonstrate that even though they are a Monopoly and backlash likely won’t affect them because people only have one place to turn to for tickets, they are still compassionate and care about their user’s experience.