Entertainment
Taylor Swift Fans Want Ticketmaster Cancelled
Taylor Swift’s next US concert tour tickets have yet to go on sale to the general public, but many fans hoping to see her in concert have already been disappointed by Ticketmaster.
Nancy Abulmagd, a mother of an 11-year-old daughter and friends, spent hours in a virtual line with thousands of other people, hoping to secure seats for her daughter and friends, only to have the website crash repeatedly and eventually turn her away empty-handed.
And Nancy was one of the lucky ones; she had won a lottery that allowed “verified fans” to participate in a four-day pre-sale before the general public.
“I got so close three or four times, and the website broke; it was agony,” the 41-year-old New Jersey resident says. “It was a deflating experience that messed with your emotions and sucked up your entire day.”
Nancy hoped to obtain Taylor Swift tickets for her 11-year-old daughter and friends.
The company selling the tickets, Ticketmaster, has stated that the issues are due to “historically unprecedented demand” for the singer, who first appeared on the scene in 2006 and has provided a steady stream of hits exploring fame and romantic entanglements.
Midnights, her most recent album, has topped the charts worldwide.
Millions of Swifties, as her fans are known, competed for tickets to her 52-city US tour during the pre-sale, with hundreds of thousands securing seats, according to Ticketmaster.
The company claims that the pre-sale system will help prevent ticket touts – known as scalpers in the United States – and bots from scooping up seats.
However, the process flaws have reignited rage against the company, which has long been accused of abusing its clout in the industry.
In an episode earlier this year, comedian John Oliver called it “one of the most hated companies on the planet,” blaming it for the exorbitant prices, fees, and scarcity of tickets for concerts and other events.
“You’re kind of at their mercy,” Nancy said, adding that Ticketmaster could have better organized the sales given the anticipated high demand for Taylor Swift tickets.
In the 1990s, Pearl Jam expressed concerns about Ticketmaster’s role as the primary ticket seller.
Since then, the company’s power has only grown. It purchased Live Nation in 2010, which operates many of the country’s event venues and has an artist management division.
Democratic lawmakers in the United States, who have called for the merger to be reversed, chimed in again amid the chaos of Taylor Swift’s pre-sale.
“Ticketmaster’s excessive wait times and fees are completely unacceptable, as seen with today’s @taylorswift13 tickets, and are a symptom of a larger problem,” wrote House Competition and Antitrust Committee Chairman David Cicilline. “It’s no secret that Live Nation-Ticketmaster is a monopoly unchecked.”
“Daily reminder that Ticketmaster is a monopoly, that its merger with LiveNation should never have been approved, and that they need to be reigned in,” wrote left-wing congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “Split them up.”
On Wednesday, the Department of Justice did not respond to a request for comment on the Taylor Swift scandal.
Ticketmaster is already subject to government oversight, which was imposed when the LiveNation acquisition was approved.
After regulators discovered that the firm had violated the terms of the agreement, the oversight was extended a few years ago.
Last month, US President Joe Biden, who has expressed concern that monopolies are becoming more common in the economy, stated that his administration would investigate concert ticket fees.
Krista Brown, the senior policy analyst at the American Economic Liberties Project, is part of a coalition of artists and others who called on the government to break up Ticketmaster last month.
She hoped that the outpouring of rage from Taylor Swift’s massive fan base would pressure the administration to act.
“If there were healthy competition in this space, [these issues] would simply not exist, and customers or fans would have other services to turn to,” she said. “You probably wouldn’t have sites crashing… This is what happens when you only have one supplier.”
But whether that will be of any comfort to fans hoping to catch a glimpse of Taylor Swift in concert remains to be seen.
Before the general public can try again, the company is restricting purchases to people who have credit cards from Capital One, the company that is sponsoring Taylor Swift’s tour.
Ticketmaster did not respond to a BBC inquiry about how many tickets were expected to be available.
Swift has added 25 shows to her tour in response to overwhelming demand and has occasionally picked fights with corporate behemoths, and has remained silent on the matter thus far.
Nancy plans to try again as a member of the general public on Friday. However, she is not optimistic.
