The Ticketmaster/Live Nation monopoly may be crumbling, all because they couldn’t deliver what they promised to all the salivating Swifties out there. For the first time in four years, Taylor Swift is going on tour which caused quite a buzz. People were lining up to buy tickets, but something went terribly, terribly wrong.
It seems the website kept crashing and kicking out the Swifties who had codes to buy tickets and then making them wait for hours in an online queue. This probably could have been prevented had the Swifties been asked to enter the code before being put in the queue but no one at Ticketmaster thought of that.
Will Swifties finally be the death of Ticketmaster?
Swifties were angry when Ticketmaster accused them and the high demand for tickets for being the problem with the service. In a now-deleted blog post they said, “Despite the destructions, Swifties powered through and helped Taylor set a new record. Over two million tickets were sold for Taylor’s shows on Nov. 15th, the most tickets ever sold for an artist in a single day.
Every ticket was sold to a buyer with a verified fan code. Nobody, not even a bot could join a queue without being verified. The two million tickets we sold only went out to verified fans.” and then they went and cancelled the sale because of high demand on their servers and insufficient inventory.
The Swifties were calling for blood.
According to the Swifties, only 15% of the ticket inventory were supposed to be put up for pre-sale. This means that Ticketmaster put all of its ticket inventory into the pre-sale if the sales numbers are to be believed. Now the Tennessee attorney general is investigating Ticket Master for this botched ticket debacle.
Now, not only have they screwed around and found out with the Swifties but they also might be staring down the barrel of some anti-trust allegations as well. The Tennessee AG just wants to make sure that no violations were incurred, but this might be how the Ticketmaster/Live Nation cookie crumbles.
Taylor Swift herself spoke out about this mess saying as follows: “Well, it goes without saying that I’m extremely protective of my fans. We’ve been doing this for decades together and over the years, I’ve brought so many elements of my career in house.
I’ve done this specifically to improve the quality of my fans’ experience by doing it myself with my team who care as much about my fans as I do. It’s really difficult for me to trust an outside entity with these relationships and loyalties, and excruciating for me to just watch mistakes happen with no recourse.
There are a multitude of reasons why people had such a hard time trying to get tickets and I’m trying to figure out how this situation can be improved moving forward. 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. It’s truly amazing that 2.4 million people got tickets but it really pisses me off that a lot of people feel like they went through several bear attacks to get them.
And to those who didn’t get tickets, all I can say is that my hope is to provide more opportunities for us to all get together and sing these songs. Thank you for wanting to be there. You have no idea how much that means.” Queen Taylor has spoken, we”lol see where the AG investigation lands next. Stay tuned!!!