Most people know of the incident that occurred on Ticketmaster’s website in November of 2022. It made headlines and caused buzz on almost every social media website. The incident I’m speaking of is the Taylor Swift Era’s Tour presale. This particular presale caused the website to crash, and caused uproar from fans.
Ticketmaster claims that they had no idea that many people would be on the site, thus causing it to crash. But that’s strange because they were the ones that gave out the presale codes and could see the data on how many people were interested in buying tickets for the concert. Plus, Taylor Swift even added extra tour dates to large cities to prepare for the extreme demand for tickets. So the people that actually had these presale codes were getting kicked out of line and sent back to the beginning at random moments, and there were thousands and thousands of people in line. Some people couldn’t even load the website after one minute. Ticketmaster then had to make the decision to cancel the general sale which was to occur the following day because of the extraordinary demand and the little amount of tickets left. Basically, every single venue sold out within mere hours. Again, Ticketmaster claims that there were an unprecedented amount of people trying to buy tickets, as well as a “staggering amount of bot attacks”. They keep trying to push the blame off of them, but anyone can see that this could have been fabricated by design.
This is not the first time Ticketmaster has had some bad press. Before this sale, ticket-buyers have noticed that the price of concert tickets are rising at a significant rate. This is because of their new dynamic pricing plan that has a certain amount of tickets that fluctuate on demand. The seed of this monopoly was planted back in 2009 when Live Nation and Ticketmaster merged. So now the company has artist management, they own venues, they have a ticketing company, and they are the largest concert producer in the world. Looking at this closely, you can see how this is a monopoly. They even let scalpers and resellers buy large amounts of tickets to make themselves a profit and rip off the common person. And because of all these recent occurrences, Congress is now looking into this.
So my question is: how are artists to combat this and ensure it doesn’t keep happening?