How Ticketmaster crashed and why it got U.S. lawmakers' attention

The public sale of tickets for Taylor Swift's newest tour was cancelled by Ticketmaster on Thursday following a frenzied few days that highlighted both Swift's enormous fan base and the shortcomings of the music industry's preeminent ticketing system.

It has called into question the status of Ticketmaster, which is owned by entertainment giant Live Nation and reportedly controls 70 per cent of the U.S. market for ticketing sales, as a monopoly in the field and has spurred a wave of anti-monopoly advocacy among not only Swift's fans but U.S. lawmakers.

After millions of Swift's fans, otherwise known as Swifties, got locked out of Ticketmaster's Verified Fan system, designed to weed out bots versus "real" fans, while others faced various technical difficulties and long wait times, several U.S lawmakers took to Twitter to express their criticism.

"Ticketmaster's excessive wait times and fees are completely unacceptable, as seen with today's Taylor Swift tickets, and are a symptom of a larger problem," U.S. Congressman David N. Cicilline, who chairs the House’s antitrust subcommittee, tweeted on Tuesday.

"It’s no secret that Live Nation-Ticketmaster is an unchecked monopoly."

The U.S. Justice Department is currently conducting "an antitrust investigation" involving Ticketmaster and Live Nation, which predated the recent chaos.

It was prompted when Live Nation and Ticketmaster merged in 2010 to create the company Live Nation Entertainment, with the goal to investigate an abuse of its monopoly power over the live music industry, according to the New York Times.

HOW THE TAYLOR SWIFT ON-SALE TURNED UPSIDE DOWN

The first of three tiers of "presales" for Swift's first public tour since 2018, started on Tuesday. This was done through Ticketmaster's Verified Fan program, which aims to sift out bots and speculators in favour of buyers who are most likely to be real fans.

During the presale, 3.5 million people signed up for the program, the largest registration in the company's history and 1.5 million of them received a special access code and were "invited" to the sale for Swift's tour, according to a later-deleted blog post by Ticketmaster.

A waiting list was created for the remaining two million confirmed fans.

"Historically, working with Verified Fan invite codes has worked as we’ve been able to manage the volume coming into the site to shop for tickets," the company said.

"However, this time the staggering number of bot attacks, as well as fans who didn’t have invite codes, drove unprecedented traffic on our site, resulting in 3.5 billion total system requests – 4 times our previous peak."

On Tuesday alone, two million tickets were sold. But the sheer demand of billions of system requests caused Ticketmaster's app to crash for many users.

Customers turned to Twitter to complain about Ticketmaster not loading or allowing them to access tickets, despite having a pre-sale code for verified fans.

"I got a code and am logged in to the correct account but it's saying I'm not verified?! What do I do?," a fan wrote on Twitter.

I got a code and am logged in to the correct account but it’s saying I’m not verified?! What do I do? I pic.twitter.com/dOwWlh099j
— Allison Wagner (@allisonewagner) November 15, 2022

Others echoed that complaint, with some calling on Ticketmaster to "FIX THIS."

On Wednesday, a second presale was held for Capital One cardholders.

However, Ticketmaster scrapped its plans for a general ticket sale on Friday, when it would ordinarily sell any tickets left over following presales.

This decision was announced on Thursday afternoon and it wasn't made clear how many tickets were still available for Swift's tour and how many had already been sold.

Ticketmaster said in a statement on Thursday that it had anticipated heavy demand for tickets to see Swift perform on her first tour in five years, but that extreme interest, combined with bot attacks, led to "unprecedented traffic on our site" and inconvenience for some fans.

"The biggest venues and artists turn to us because we have the leading ticketing technology in the world – that doesn’t mean it’s perfect, and clearly for Taylor’s on sale it wasn’t," the statement said. "But we’re always working to improve the ticket buying experience."

Swift spoke out Friday about the ticketing debacle on Instagram and blamed Ticketmaster for the snafu, noting that there was a "multitude of reasons why people had such a hard time" getting tickets.

"I'm not going to make excuses for anyone because we asked them, multiple times, if they could handle this kind of demand and we were assured they could," the singer wrote.

WHY U.S. LAWMAKERS GOT INVOLVED

Ticketmaster has long been on the radar of American politicians and celebrities, due to its almost total control over the U.S. live music and ticketing industry.

But, despite a 2010 court filing in the case raising objections to the merger, the Justice Department and states allowed the Live Nation Ticketmaster merger to go through.

In the filing, the Justice Department said that Ticketmaster’s share among major concert venues exceeded 80 per cent.

While Swift's tour is the most recent victim of Ticketmaster's ticketing woes, the platform has received similar criticism before.

The business was critiqued earlier this year for its "Platinum pricing," which causes some tickets to surge sharply in reaction to demand, including for tours by Bruce Springsteen and Blink-182.

Several members of the U.S. Congress see the ongoing debacle as a symptom of a larger issue: the monopolization of the market caused by large corporations combining with one another.

The CEO of Live Nation, Michael Rapino, received a letter from U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar, chair of the Senate subcommittee on antitrust and consumer protection, expressing concern that Ticketmaster continues to abuse its market dominance.

In her letter, Klobuchar points out that Ticketmaster's dominance "insulates it from the competitive pressures that typically push companies to innovate and improve their services," often causing its customers to face the consequences.

"I am concerned about a pattern of non-compliance with your legal obligations," she writes, charting down questions for the CEO regarding the company's missteps.

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said in a now deleted tweet on Tuesday that "Ticketmaster is a monopoly," and "its merger should never have been approved."

With files from The Associated Press, CNN and Reuters

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