Taylor Swift’s 2023 U.S. concert tour was supposed to go on sale to the general public on Friday, but Ticketmaster decided to cancel it because of a record-breaking 3.5 billion ticket requests from fans, bots, and scalpers.
While this was going on, customers complained more and more about high prices and bad service, and important people in the US Congress publicly asked the DOJ to look into Ticketmaster because of antitrust laws.
The entertainment industry was already buzzing about the American singer’s eagerly awaited “Eras” tour, her first in five years. The most tickets ever sold for an artist in a single day during the “presale” round on Tuesday totaled over 2 million, according to Ticketmaster.
But the long wait times and problems with the website made many fans unhappy, and many couldn’t get tickets.
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When the remaining tickets might go back on sale was not immediately known.
Representatives of Ticketmaster didn’t respond right away to requests for interviews to talk about the problems, but the company, whose parent company is Live Nation Entertainment (NYSE:LYV), did put out a statement acknowledging the problems fans were having.
According to Ticketmaster, the most ever registered and verified fans totaled 3.5 million, a record. According to Ticketmaster, it intended to put 1.5 million of those people on a waiting list and invite 1.5 million of them to participate in the sale for all 52 performance dates, including the 47 that Ticketmaster sold.
However, it claimed that the scheme was jeopardised by “bot” attacks—automated software requests—as well as demand from those who had not previously registered.
3.5 billion total system requests—or four times as many as at our previous peak—came from the startling number of bot attacks and fans without invite codes, according to Ticketmaster. Never before has the sale of a verified fan attracted so much attention or unwelcome volume.
Swift’s 20-city, 52-date stadium tour is slated to kick off in Arizona in March and conclude in August with five performances at Los Angeles’ 70,000-seat SoFi Stadium.
Because of these problems, members of the US Congress questioned the 2010 merger of Live Nation and Ticketmaster, which created a market leader.
Richard Blumenthal, a senator from the United States, tweeted on Thursday, “I’ve long asked the DOJ to investigate the situation of competition in the ticketing sector.”
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of the United States shared a link to an online petition that asks the Justice Department to get rid of Ticketmaster.
A spokeswoman for the Justice Department declined to comment.
In a letter to Ticketmaster, Senator Amy Klobuchar, who heads the Senate antitrust panel, said that she was “very concerned about the state of competition in the ticketing sector and how it hurts consumers.”
The dominance of Ticketmaster in the primary ticket market shields it from the competitive forces that generally drive businesses to innovate and enhance their offerings, according to Klobuchar. Consumers may have to pay the price in the form of service breakdowns like the ones we saw this week.
Klobuchar asked Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino about how much the company had spent on technology upgrades to handle spikes in demand and what percentage of tickets for high-profile tours were set aside for presales.
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In 2010, Live Nation and Ticketmaster made a deal that was okayed by the Justice Department. Klobuchar said that she had doubts about the deal at the time.
For many years, artists and fans have been upset with Ticketmaster. The grunge band Pearl Jam chose to go on tour without using Ticketmaster in the middle of the 1990s, but after 14 months they found it too cumbersome and went back.