Angry Taylor Swift fans are pushing lawmakers to make
concert ticketing less predatory.
I’m Dometi Pongo and this is MTV News Need To Know.
Lawmakers are getting involved in the recent debacle surrounding
Taylor Swift’s chaotic ticket sales for her upcoming Eras Tour.
Let’s rewind to earlier this month.
On November 15, presale tickets for Swift’s upcoming U.S. trek became
available online for members of Ticketmaster’s Verified Fan program,
which was launched in an effort to combat bots.
Tons of fans were left waiting for as long as three hours behind
thousands of others,
and when many of them finally reached the front of the digital line,
they got hit with error messages.
Ticket prices, which were already up to $450 originally,
skyrocketed on third-party sites, with some costing over $28,000.
Needless to say, Swift fans were pissed.
And remember, this was just for the Verified Fan program.
The backlash got more intense when Ticketmaster later canceled the
public sale of tickets for the tour altogether.
That’s when Swift broke her silence,
apologizing to her fans on her Instagram Stories, saying in part,
Ticketmaster also issued an apology,
blaming the problem on unprecedented demand and a
The demand for The Eras Tour tickets were driven up
in part by automated bots,
set up to scour the internet for high-demand tickets,
buy up a huge number,
and resell them for much higher prices to pocket the profits.
We’ve seen this with top acts like Bob Dylan, Adele, and Miley Cyrus.
Recently, 22,000 people pre-registered to buy tickets
to see Blake Shelton,
but only a few hundred actually got them.
So what can be done to keep fans from being exploited
or priced out of concerts?
In 2016, Congress passed the Better Online Ticket Sales Act,
also known as the BOTS Act, which aims at cracking down on this.
It gives the government authority to penalize those who misuse bots to
buy large swaths of tickets online.
But in the six years since the law passed,
the Federal Trade Commission has only enforced the BOTS Act once.
Senators Richard Blumenthal and Marsha Blackburn wrote a letter to
the FTC this week,
asking why the agency has barely cracked down on bots use,
and if there were roadblocks to keeping ticketing fair that Congress
needs to know about.
One major issue here is that Ticketmaster has no real competition,
something that Congress tried to safeguard against when Live Nation
acquired Ticketmaster in 2010 with a consent decree.
That mandate set up guardrails that included a $1 million fine
if the company tried to bully venues into using their services.
But AOC still sees issues.
The day Ticketmaster fumbled the Swift ticket rollout, she tweeted,
She and Senator Amy Klobuchar have been railing against Ticketmaster
because the company almost singularly controls the distribution of
concert tickets for the world’s most influential artists.
And with that much control comes some shady moves to boost profits.
When you buy an event ticket,
up to 78% of the cost goes to Ticketmaster fees.
They’ve even got a dynamic pricing system that drives up ticket prices
due to demand.
Ticketmaster was in hot water over the summer,
when seats to Bruce Springsteen’s first tour in six years went on sale,
and were driven up to as high as $4,000 apiece.
Cory Doctorow, co-author of the book ‘Chokepoint Capitalism,’
suggests Ticketmaster is complicit in price gouging
by dominating the resale business:
"They have their own resale software. It's called Trade Desk,
"and in 2018, an investigation revealed that Ticketmaster had
"encouraged and incentivized resellers to set enormously high
"ticket resale prices.
"Ticketmaster loves resales for one simple reason:
"They get to charge their service fees twice."
So what we end up with is one business that's controlling the
mainstream market and the gray market.
But major artists do have some leverage to help curtail this.
Ed Sheeran, for example,
has banned the resale of his tickets for over the original price.
On Sheeran’s sold-out tour in 2018, promoters
The average listener makes it possible
for artists to tour in the first place.
And as inflation and other costs are crippling everyday people,
it is damn near criminal for these fans to get priced out of
seeing these artists live.
But a step in the right direction is when fan groups, like the Swifties,
make their voices heard and prompt lawmakers to seek actual solutions.
I’m Dometi Pongo and that’s what you need to know.