Ticketmaster must fall – and Taylor Swift fans could bring it down

Forget The Beatles versus the Stones, Beyoncé versus Adele, or Blur versus Oasis. The music industry looks set for its greatest ever battle: Swifties versus Ticketmaster.

Swifties are Taylor Swift fans, and it’s safe to say many members of this vast army have had a terrible week. The chaos started on Tuesday when so-called pre-sale tickets went on sale for the pop superstar’s upcoming US stadium tour, her first for five years. Millions of fans had special pre-sale codes allowing them to buy tickets before they went on general sale on Friday November 18. But such was the extraordinary demand that the Ticketmaster website crashed and legions of Swifties were either left waiting hours to buy tickets or unable to purchase them at all. Tickets soon appeared on resale sites for, in some cases, tens of thousands of dollars.

Cue fury from people who’d rightly assumed that they had fast-lane access to see their idol perform live. Things then took a surreal turn on Thursday evening when Ticketmaster cancelled today’s general sale due to “insufficient remaining ticket inventory”. In other words there weren’t enough tickets left. Looked at another way, tickets basically sold out in the pre-sale (Ticketmaster isn’t saying how many, if any, are left). 

Then Swift herself got involved, saying in a brutal statement that the whole debacle was “excruciating” to watch. Without naming Ticketmaster, she said she’d asked an “outside entity” whether they could handle the demand and had been “assured they could”. She sounded like she rued having to outsource ticket sales at all. Seeing fans suffer “really p_____ me off”, she said. Ouch.

The situation is ludicrous on a number of levels. It suggests an almost surreal Orwellian world in which a sale, like René Magritte’s famous painting of a pipe, is not a sale at all. It points to a music industry where fans need to be super-fans in order to get a shot at buying a ticket (if you’re a mere member of the general public, forget about it). And it raises questions about whether the live music and ticketing ecosystem is fit for purpose. It’s on this last point that battle lines are being drawn.

Swifties are a resourceful and passionate community. Digital natives, Gen Z warriors, smart and loyal, they’re not people to be messed with. They have realised that the 2010 mega-merger between Ticketmaster and Live Nation, the venue operator and concert promotor, effectively created a monopoly that caused the conditions that allowed the current situation to happen. Ticketmaster now controls over 70 per cent of ticketing at major concert venues. And fans’ retribution against the company could be, well, Swiftie.

Social media is bubbling with Swift fans vowing to break Ticketmaster’s stranglehold on live music. A website called The Swiftiest (tagline: “for the love of Taylor”) has launched a campaign to “defeat the monopoly that allows Ticketmaster to abuse fans with impunity”. One fan wrote on Twitter: “When Taylor Swift wrote [new song] The Great War, she was actually preparing us for the Battle of Ticketmaster.” 

Politicians have joined the crusade. On Tuesday, US politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called for Ticketmaster and Live Nation to be broken up. The Biden administration is already examining the high fees levied on concert tickets. Could the Swifties be the ones to force change by turning a groundswell into a revolution? I wouldn’t put it past them.

Meanwhile, UK Swifties should brace themselves. Swift is yet to reveal European tour dates but an announcement is thought to be imminent. Unless Ticketmaster or Swift’s team changes the way the ticket sale is run, then UK fans with pre-sale codes might suffer a similar fate. (Swift’s team was approached for comment for this piece). Watch this space.

First, some mind-boggling figures. The demand for Swift tickets was historically unprecedented, Ticketmaster said in a blog post that has since been deleted. It had been overwhelmed on Tuesday: it received an astonishing 3.5 billion – that’s billion – requests for tickets from a combination of fans and “bots”, which are automated computer programmes that act as agents for third-party ticket tout sites. That number is four times Ticketmaster’s previous peak. Swift is playing 52 dates on the US leg of her Eras tour, and Ticketmaster sold over two million tickets on the day, the most ever for an artist in a single day. However reports suggested that Swift would need to perform 900 concerts in order to fulfil Tuesday’s demand.

In its widely-reported blog, Ticketmaster said that a record 3.5 million people had registered for the pre-sale in the US. Ticketmaster had planned to invite 1.5 million of these so-called “verified fans” to buy tickets, with the other two million placed on a waiting list. But the bots got involved, as did a large number of fans who weren’t verified. A meltdown occurred.

The stories are awful. For a start, pre-sale tickets being released on a Tuesday meant many fans had to take the day off work. There are reports of schoolchildren even taking the day off school. The New York Times reported on one 16-year-old, Sarah Pontillo, who’d made sock monkeys from cheap socks to sell to classmates in order to raise money for a ticket (she eventually got one, but after four hours of trying and “a lot of pain”). A fan from New York called Bonnie Gross waited online for six hours. 

When she finally got through, there was one seat available for around $200. But she didn’t want to go alone so didn’t buy it, she told the New York Times. One particularly enterprising fan called Ruben Martinez Jr was being held in the virtual waiting room and decided to hack into the platform’s code. Martinez built a Google Chrome extension that would show him his exact place in the queue. More than 13,000 people were ahead of him (although three hours later he was able to secure six tickets). 

It's not just Ticketmaster that fans had problems with. One Swiftie, Sydney Wallace, wrote on Twitter that she'd waited in line for eight hours only for ticket platform SeatGeek to charge her over fourteen times for tickets that she was never able to purchase. As a result, her bank accounts were frozen and she was "broke".

Swift’s statement was excoriating. A renowned planner and careful custodian of her own brand, she said that “it goes without saying that I’m extremely protective of my fans”. She wrote: “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 [her caps] to improve the quality of my fans’ experience by doing it myself with my team who care as much about 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.” Swift said there were a “multitude” of reasons for the mess and said she was trying to figure out how the situation can be improved going 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 them feel like they went through several bear attacks to get them.”

The situation is partly, it has to be said, a result of her own popularity. Her latest album Midnights, released last month, sold the equivalent of over 1.5 million copies in the US alone, the largest total for any album in seven years. In the UK it went to number one as did the song Anti-Hero, giving her the top slot in both the album and singles charts.

As part of Swift’s pre-release push, fans who bought the album from her official store were promised a pre-sale code for the forthcoming tour (this is separate from Ticketmaster’s verified fan system and is believed to be known as a “boost” in the Swift universe). Midnights was released in a large number of popular formats – lavender, mahogany and jade green vinyl, to name just a few – and therefore many fans would have expected that tickets were attainable. 

So there’s a degree of the law of unintended consequences being at play here: while concert pre-sale codes were a nifty carrot to boost sales of the album, they have now arguably become something of a banana skin, to mix my food metaphors.

Swift’s popularity was acknowledged by Live Nation (and therefore Ticketmaster) chairman Greg Maffei on CNBC on Thursday when he addressed the ticket carnage. “It’s a function of Taylor Swift,” he said. “The site was supposed to open up for 1.5 million verified Taylor Swift fans. We had 14 million people hit the site, including bots, which are not supposed to be there.”

That sounds like an excuse to me. It’s obvious why fans are furious. One thing is clear: you won’t have heard the last of Swifties’ attack on Ticketmaster and the ticketing system in general. A Facebook group of Swifties calling for ticket resellers to be dealt with has 24,000 members, enough people to fill London’s O2. The Swiftiest website is brutally forthright in its assessment. “There is no fan base better suited to taking Ticketmaster down,” it says. Swifties are angry and they’re mobilising. Oh dear, Ticketmaster. Look what you made them do.