www.businessinsider.com: Some US senators aren't ready to shake off the chaos of trying to purchase Taylor Swift tickets.
The prolific singer, songwriter, and director's ticket sales for her Eras tour prompted immense backlash against Ticketmaster, and refreshed old concerns over the ticket distributor's 2010 merger with Live Nation.
3 comments:
As someone who vaguely follows Taylor Swift and has many friends who are huge Swifteys I have heard about the craziness of pre-sales since November 15th. The chaos and disappointment of Ticketmastere’s actions have also been on my For You Page since pre-sales went up. Ticketmaster’s actions over the years have escalated to such a point where even to me, someone who has not gone to a concert in years, the monopoly over the live event industry is incredibly obvious. I have heard about fans of Olivia Rodrigo and Harry styles being screwed over by Ticketmaster time and time again and the fact that it has been going on for years and the government has not done anything about this monopoly is ridiculous. I understand the idea of supply and demand but it seems to me ticketmaster does not repeatedly choosing to screw over fans and artists time and time again.
Theo
Even though I had no intention of getting a ticket for the Eras tour, this whole situation with Ticketmaster has been something that I have been vaguely following. This problem goes far beyond just Taylor Swift’s fans being unable to procure tickets for her upcoming tour – this dips into the issue of monopolization. If it took a failed ticket drop for a Taylor Swift concert to bring this issue to the forefront of the public eye, so be it. I completely understand the concept of Ticketmaster. It is a one stop shop for tickets to a number of different events; be it concerts, shows, or other events. But the fact that Ticketmaster has a hold on a majority of the biggest and most popular venues, and is the sole company that can sell tickets for these places is a huge problem. They can charge pretty much whatever they so please for these events, and the artists don’t have much say in it. This is entirely unfair to end users who want to buy tickets for these events. Corporate greed and monopolization of particular sectors of business will be the death of us.
It was completely insane to see how this presale went for Taylor’s tour. I had friends who were in the ticket queue for 5-6 hours just to find out that they were no longer selling or that the sale was postponed or nothing at that point was available. For every other presale that I have seen, there has always been a reserved amount of tickets for regular sale and pre sale separately so more people have the opportunity to jump on getting a ticket. I’m not sure what the motive behind doing it this way was (probably money up front and fast), but it has definitely created some very unhappy fans out of it. And it sounds like Live Nation is really going to have to deal with a lot of this fallback now with investigations around the merger between the two companies. Ticket prices and fees have gotten extremely out of hand and concerts are completely inaccessible for a reasonable price. I hope something is done about this.
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