Swift Vengeance: Ticketmaster May Have Finally Met Its Match

Julissa Duran, Staff Reporter

 

On November 18, the Department of Justice announced that they will be opening an investigation into Ticketmaster’s parent company Live Nation, following the events of Taylor Swift’s “Eras” Tour presale.

 

In 2017 Ticketmaster introduced Verified fan, a system created to help “protect fans bots and scalpers” as stated on the Ticketmaster blog. Ironically people have called out this system for doing the exact opposite. Fans of different artists have spoken out against it stating that it needs to be better organized and filtered to better ensure that it is actual fans getting the presales codes. Rather than ensuring peace, it’s caused more panic when it comes to ticket buying. Many fans have to end up buying from resellers that mark up the prices at an alarmingly high rate. 

 

When Taylor Swift announced her “Eras” tour, fans were ecstatic at the prospect of hearing songs from her self-titled debut album, Midnights. Over 3.5 million fans rushed to sign up for the site’s verified fan presale. Chaos quickly erupted after fans, who’d been waiting in the queue line for hours, started experiencing site crashes and unusable codes. 

 

Taylor Swift isn’t the only artist whose fan base has experienced trouble with the company. For years, Ticketmaster has been known for being a rather problematic site to get tickets due to its high prices. prevalence of resellers, and technical difficulties. In early November, Paramore fans experienced issues with the site. When fans logged on to get their presale tickets, most of them had already been bought and marked up to absurd prices.

 

With how upset consumers are becoming with ticketmaster’s business philosophy many are starting to go after the artist as well due to association with the infamous company. If the company were to fall, it may even come with setbacks for artists that benefited off the site’s dynamic pricing. 

 

Ticketmaster’s monopoly is one that is hard to turn a blind eye too. In a recent article by Investopedia it was reported that the company controls over 70% of the ticketing market. The company uses dynamic pricing: a module that allows ticket prices to go up and down in price based on demand. The company had an estimated revenue of 1.1 billion in 2021. Ticketmaster is able to make this much profit by taking 10% from the seller and imposing a service fee of around 20% on the buyer 

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