When Taylor Swift’s Midnights album was released, it broke records for the number of streams, number of sales, and number of songs topping the charts.
Now, the singer-songwriter’s upcoming United States tour has all but broken Ticketmaster, with millions of fans left unimpressed and politicians calling for the ticketing giant to be broken up.
So what actually happened, why are politicians getting involved, and what has Ticketmaster said?
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What happened?
On Tuesday, millions of Taylor Swift fans tried to buy presale tickets to the singer-songwriter’s The Eras Tour of the US, causing periodic outages and long online waits.
Fans reported waiting in online queues for up to eight hours, and many finding they were too late to buy tickets, which cost between US$49 ($73) and US$449 ($668) each.
A presale involves tickets being made available to a select group before they are released for sale to the general public.
“I’m a failure as a father,” wrote Dave Pell, author of the popular NextDraft newsletter.
“The one time my daughter really needed me to come through for her, I ended up on the outside looking in, banished to the barren badlands of the Taylor Swift ticket waiting list wasteland,” he said.
Other fans said they were repeatedly dropped from queues and turned their ire toward Ticketmaster. Some said they took a day off work and felt the process should have gone more smoothly.
Waits of several hours also were reported on ticket seller SeatGeek, which was selling tickets to Swift shows in Arlington, Texas, and Glendale, Arizona. SeatGeek said it, too, experienced high demand and urged fans to “please be patient.”
Another presale, for Capital One credit card holders, was postponed from Tuesday to Wednesday.
Some buyers are already looking to cash in on the fervour, with ticket resellers trying to fetch as much as US$28,000 ($41,700) per ticket on Wednesday.
Ticketmaster, owned by Live Nation Entertainment said the sale had prompted “unprecedented demand” that caused delays and that it worked quickly to resolve them.
Why are some politicians now calling for Ticketmaster to be broken up?
It wasn’t just members of the public frustrated with Ticketmaster, with US politicians also taking to Twitter to criticise the company.
“Ticketmaster’s excessive wait times and fees are completely unacceptable, as seen with today’s @taylorswift13 tickets,” Rhode Island congressman David Cicilline wrote on Twitter.
He added that the 2010 merger of Ticketmaster and Live Nation, which had US Justice Department approval, should not have been allowed.
“It’s no secret that Live Nation-Ticketmaster is an unchecked monopoly,” he said.
The ticketing industry has frustrated Americans for years with hidden fees, limited ticket availability because of presales, and other irritations.
Mr Cicilline, who chairs the House of Representatives antitrust panel, called on the Justice Department to investigate.
New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said the company needed to be “reigned in”.
“Daily reminder that Ticketmaster is a monopoly, it’s merger with LiveNation should never have been approved, and they need to be reigned in,” she wrote on Twitter.
“Break them up.”
What has Ticketmaster said?
The ticket-selling site told fans on Tuesday morning, via a statement on Twitter, that it was experiencing “intermittent issues” that the company was “urgently” working to resolve.
Later, Ticketmaster tweeted that there had been “historically unprecedented demand” for Swift’s first tour since 2018, from millions of people. Ticket sales for West Coast shows were delayed by three hours.
Hundreds of thousands of people did grab tickets to Swift’s tour, Ticketmaster said.
A Ticketmaster spokesperson said the number of people who registered for the early sale was more than twice the number of tickets available, and that millions of others also jumped online to buy.
