Presale Postmortem: Swifties, Now Is the Time to Overthrow the Ticketmaster Monopoly

Swifties across social media expressed their discontent, confusion, sadness, and anger at Ticketmaster. While the reaction to this entire debacle is absolutely warranted, it comes without surprise as Swift’s ticket presale was horribly mismanaged. Fans that received an access code were not prompted to use it until they entered the stadium map to purchase tickets, meaning there were potentially hundreds if not thousands of people accessing the queue that didn’t even have an access code, hampering the website’s traffic.

Likewise, Ticketmaster responded three hours after presales began with a statement that blamed “historically unprecedented demand” for the outages, except Ticketmaster knew exactly how many people signed up for presale and had accurate numbers on how many people would be accessing their site. As users in other time zones began to log on for their respective presale, users on the East Coast were still waiting in their queues, effectively stacking the website traffic and further buckling the site’s hosting capability.

At 1:05 p.m. ET, Ticketmaster announced on Twitter that it would be rescheduling West Coast presale, which was scheduled to begin 5 minutes prior, to 6 p.m. ET while CapitalOne presale would be pushed back 24 hours to 2 p.m. on November 16. Ticketmaster experienced additional outages during this rescheduled presale, according to Downdetector.

Swift is not the only artist who has offered an abysmal ticket buying process through Ticketmaster. As Vice reported last month, Blink 182 fans were shocked to find outrageous ticket prices for the band’s 2023 reunion tour, with singer Mark Hoppus even describing his own awful experience of trying to buy tickets to his own show. Ticketmaster has been using a dynamic pricing algorithm which can surge the price of a ticket depending on demand and venue to thwart scalpers from buying and selling the tickets secondhand. What this means, however, is that there is no longer a face value for a ticket as long as Ticketmaster is selling it with dynamic pricing—it will change inordinately with demand.

Dynamic pricing was also the culprit behind Bruce Springsteen’s $5,000 concert tickets this summer, says the New York Times, which fans noticed during a Ticketmaster presale. Adele fans faced a similar issue trying to secure ticket sales for her Las Vegas residency, with prices skyrocketing to a massive $41,280 according to the New York Post. The company behind the price? Ticketmaster. These exorbitant prices also don’t include the extra fees tacked on during checkout, which can be a substantial percentage of the ticket’s cost. While price wasn’t necessarily the core issue of Swift’s presale for The Eras Tour, the performance of Ticketmaster’s digital infrastructure coupled with its track record of price-gouging dynamic pricing paints a very clear and long-standing picture of a corporation with too much power.

Ticketmaster merged with Live Nation officially in 2010, and the New York Times reported then that Ticketmaster cornered “70% of the concert ticket market,” and the merger naturally faced a lot of backlash and friction from the live music industry. This level of power allows Ticketmaster to maintain a stranglehold on the concert industry, which has many forms—one of which is an agreement between venues and Ticketmaster itself.

Swift is one of the world’s largest musical acts who needs a certain amount of space to reasonably host a concert that thousands of people will pay to attend. Under these conditions, Ticketmaster could leverage the limited amount of stadiums across the country to their benefit with exclusive deals. For example, Metlife Stadium in East Rutherford, where Swift will be playing in May 2023, is in agreement with Ticketmaster, where the company serves as the “official ticketing partner for all events” at Metlife Stadium. That means if you want to attend a concert or sports event at the arena, you will be purchasing your tickets through Ticketmaster—and potentially paying top dollar through dynamic pricing and/or experiencing website outages.

Calls to break up Ticketmaster plagued the internet in the aftermath of Swift’s presale yesterday. “Daily reminder that Ticketmaster is a monopoly, it’s merger with LiveNation should never have been approved, and they need to be reigned in,” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted after the Eras Tour fallout. “Break them up.” Similar outrage has been seen in the wake of recent major stadium tour ticket sales as fans, activists, and politicians continually become outraged at the power the company has over the industry and consumers.

This hullaballoo does beg the question: Could Swift, someone with a huge following leverage her influence in the charge to find an alternative to Ticketmaster? Probably not. Ticketmaster’s agreements with stadiums means that Swift would have to find locations without a Ticketmaster foothold that are large enough to host her concerts. She would also have to find some other ticket provider that could handle her level of demand. Maybe it’s plausible, but Pearl Jam already tried to take on Ticketmaster in 1995, and failed miserably.

The Ticketmaster monopoly could be destroyed, but it would take a lot of work. The Ringer argues that it is not enough for a company to only be too big to warrant it broken up under the Sherman Antitrust Law, that company must be exerting their power in a way that destroys competition and abuses consumers—that’s hard to do. Likewise, capitalism moves faster than the government ever could, meaning that breaking up monopolies is probably a losing game as tech companies acquire assets faster than legislation can be passed.

While breaking up the Ticketmaster monopoly is an uphill battle, Taylor Swift’s tour has brought the issue to what is probably its largest audience. The Swifties are feral, to be blunt, and the anger and distress they feel in the wake of being snubbed tickets to The Eras Tour could be the gateway into awareness and collective action against Ticketmaster as coalitions like Break Up Ticketmaster pop up and call for investigations into the behemoth.