Taylor Swift fans were left bitterly disappointed after Ticketmaster cancelled a general ticket sale for the singer’s US tour next year following a chaotic pre-sale that overwhelmed the site.
Ticketmaster, the world’s largest ticketing site which is owned by the events giant Live Nation, scrapped the sale citing “insufficient remaining ticket inventory”, without revealing how many tickets had been allocated.
The cancellation was connected to the complex means by which Ticketmaster sells tickets in order to prevent automated users – known as scalper bots – from “buying up an already limited amount of tickets and reselling them”, said Time magazine.
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To get around this problem, Ticketmaster asks fans to pre-register as a “Verified Fan” to access the platform. Before tickets then go on sale, verified fans receive a notification telling them that they’ve either been selected for the pre-sale or have been put on a waiting list.
In the case of tickets for Swift’s tour – her first in five years – an unprecedented 3.5 million fans applied for pre-registration, with 1.5 million people given pre-sale codes for the initial sale on Tuesday. But for those “lucky enough to make it through the Ticketmaster culling, the problems were just beginning”, said The New York Times.
On the day of the sale, Ticketmaster received 3.5 billion system requests, crashing the site for many users and putting others in queues that moved slowly or, for some shoppers, didn’t move at all.
So desperate were some parents to secure tickets for their children that they “took a day off work” only to end up “waiting in online queues for up to eight hours” before discovering “they were too late to purchase tickets”, said The Guardian.
Ticketmaster said: “While it’s impossible for everyone to get tickets to these shows, we know we can do more to improve the experience and that’s what we're focused on.”
Later that day, tickets which had a face value of $49 to $499 were listed on resale platforms for as much as $22,700 (£19,100) each.
Ticketmaster under scrutiny
The incident has shone a spotlight on Ticketmaster and its monopoly over concert tickets. The site “overwhelmingly dominates the ticketing industry”, said Sky News, and “has for years left fans and artists frustrated by hidden fees, soaring costs, and limited tickets availability due to presales”.
Even politicians weighed in on the chaotic affair, with US Democratic congress member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeting: “Daily reminder that Ticketmaster is a monopoly, its merger with LiveNation should never have been approved, and they need to be reigned in. Break them up.”
Ticketmaster is facing “more scrutiny from politicians” as a result of the troubled pre-sales, said TechCrunch. Along with Ocasio-Cortez, Tennessee attorney general Jonathan Skrmetti is calling for an investigation into “whether Ticketmaster violated consumer’s rights and antitrust regulations”.
It’s not the first time the company has had to defend its practices, having faced multiple accusations of monopoly and malpractice following its 2010 merger with Live Nation.
“We are concerned about this very dominant market player, and we want to make sure that they’re treating consumers right and that people are receiving a fair opportunity to purchase the tickets that clearly matter a great deal to them,” Skrmetti told reporters during a news conference on Wednesday.
The company is “already subject to government monitoring”, oversight that was imposed when the Live Nation purchase was approved and then “extended a few years ago after regulators found the firm had violated the terms of the agreement”, reported the BBC.
Live Nation “runs many of the country’s event venues and has an artist management business”, the broadcaster added.
