Taylor Swift’s live concert tickets sold out so quickly that the general public could not get any. The public sale for the singer’s US tour was postponed on Thursday by Ticketmaster due to “extraordinarily high demands on ticketing systems and limited remaining ticket inventory.”
In advance sales to selected audiences, it has already sold more than two million seats. After the demand crashed its website, the corporation faced criticism.
One of the fans who won a lottery to enter the pre-sale remarked, “I got so close three or four times and the website broke. It was agonizing.
On Tuesday, she spent hours in a virtual line with thousands of other people to secure seats for her daughter, 11, and friends. However, the website kept crashing, forcing her to give up empty-handed.
The 41-year-old from New Jersey described the event as “very disheartening, it messed with your emotions and swallowed up your whole day.”
The company attributed the issues to both tremendous demands for the artist, who first emerged on the scene in 2006 and has provided a constant stream of songs ever since, and a “staggering amount of bot attacks” that overloaded its website.
Midnights, her most recent album, has topped charts all over the world.
More than 3.5 million Swifties, as her admirers are referred to, registered ahead of time as “verified fans” in the hopes of obtaining tickets for her 52-city US tour during the pre-sale, according to the firm.
On Tuesday, November 15, sales for those unique fans began.
Additionally, Ticketmaster offered a pre-sale for those using Capital One credit cards, the issuer of the 52-city tour’s sponsorship.
Ticketmaster reported that despite difficulties during the pre-sale that it believed disrupted 15% of site interactions, it still sold more than 2 million tickets – the most ever for an artist in a single day.
Ticketmaster announced the cancellation of the public sale for Friday on Thursday.
Although not everyone can attend these performances, the business had earlier stated, “We know we can do more to improve the experience and that’s what we’re concentrating on.”
According to Ticketmaster, the pre-sale mechanism is designed to help stop bots and ticket touts, often known as scalpers in the US, from snatching up tickets.
However, the process’s flaws—resale sites have already displayed tickets for tens of thousands of dollars—have rekindled outrage toward the company, which has long been the target of complaints that it abuses its influence over the sector.
British comedian John Oliver called Ticketmaster “one of the most loathed organizations on earth” in an episode of his HBO series Last Week Tonight earlier this year, blaming them for the high costs, outrageous fees, and limited availability that confront consumers seeking to attend concerts and other events.
In the 1990s, Pearl Jam expressed dissatisfaction with Ticketmaster’s position as the primary ticket vendor.
Since then, the company’s dominance has only increased. It acquired Live Nation in 2010, a company that manages a number of the nation’s event facilities as well as a talent agency.
During the Taylor Swift pre-sale controversy, US Democratic politicians who had advocated for the cancellation of that merger spoke up again.
Rep. David Cicilline, chair of the House committee on competition and anti-trust, wrote that “Ticketmaster’s high wait times and surcharges are simply unacceptable, as evidenced with today’s @taylorswift13 tickets, and are a sign of a broader problem.” “Live Nation-Ticketmaster is an unregulated monopoly, and that is no secret.”
On Wednesday, a request for comment regarding the Taylor Swift scandal received no response from the Department of Justice.
Government scrutiny of Ticketmaster was already put in place when the LiveNation acquisition was approved.
After regulators discovered the company had broken the conditions of the agreement a few years ago, the oversight was extended.
Additionally, US President Joe Biden announced last month that his administration will investigate concert ticket pricing. Biden has voiced worry that monopolies have proliferated throughout the economy.
A group of musicians and others launched a campaign last month urging the government to dissolve Ticketmaster. Krista Brown, a senior policy analyst at the American Economic Liberties Project, is one of the organizers of the initiative.
She expressed her optimism that the administration will be pressured into acting as a result of the indignation from Taylor Swift’s sizable fan base.
“These issues just wouldn’t be present and clients or fans would have other options to turn to,” she said if there was robust competition in this market. When you have a single provider, this is what happens. “You definitely wouldn’t have sites crashing.”
But it’s unclear if saying that will assist fans who were hoping to catch Taylor Swift in concert to get over their disappointment.
Also Read: Is Deadliest Catch’s Josh Harris Wed? Family And Wealth
