There has been great excitement among the Swifties ever since Taylor Swift announced the dates for her Midnights tour. Tickets went on sale on November 15th on Ticketmaster, but because there were so many people on just one website, the app crashed. There was uncertainty as to the amount of tickets sold and how many were remaining. This sparked a debate: who should be blamed for such a large-scale crash?
Quite obviously, fans of Swift would take her side and blame Ticketmaster. Ever since Ticketmaster merged with the other largest ticket selling website Live Nation back in 2009, it has been questioned whether it violates several antitrust regulations. I personally agree with this stance. Because let’s be honest — how many other ticket selling companies do you know?
And in response to all the backlash, Swift has said that she and her team had “asked them, multiple times, if they could handle this kind of demand and we were assured they could.” Although it was never specified, it is implied that the “them” in that sentence referred to Ticketmaster. Meaning, they had said they could handle that many people on their website on one time without truly knowing how many people would be on their website.
A majority of venues refuse to sell tickets off any other website, forcing buyers to purchase tickets on Ticketmaster. And more buyers means the prices can rise because there’s no competition. Since Swift’s presale tickets were sold in an instance like this, prices were high and the crash happened in mere minutes.
Many disagree with this accusation towards Ticketmaster and choose to blame the singer instead. Swift is one of the most popular artists of this century, with more than 84 million monthly listeners on Spotify. They say that because of this, it was clear that there would be an extremely high demand for tickets and that she could have distributed and planned the selling of them more wisely. Also, critics say, most of the money doesn’t even go towards Ticketmaster or any other ticket distributor. Rather, a large sum of money goes towards the artists themselves, meaning Swift earned more money than Ticketmaster after the crash.
But let’s be real: Ticketmaster is a multibillion dollar company that is highly dependent on recognizable artists just like Taylor Swift for profit. Obviously, they would seek any opportunity they could to earn more money, and monopolizing Swift’s Midnights presale tickets would be the perfect way to do that, even if they didn’t get all the money.
As of now, all Swift can do is address the situation. But fans have gone so far as to sue Ticketmaster, claiming that Ticketmaster has “messed with the wrong fans” after the site had stopped the selling of any potentially remaining tickets.
