Limited supply and high demand within an incompetent framework combine to form a colossal nightmare. It gets even worse when the demand comes from Taylor Swift fans aka Swifties, because that means it’s going to get ridiculously competitive. The Eras Tour opened for presale earlier this week, and everything that could’ve gone wrong went wrong.
When a digital stampede resulted in Ticketmaster crashing, number of users were told that they might have to wait up to five days before having access to the portal that would allow them to make a purchase. Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti is now looking into whether antitrust violations could be the reason behind this debacle. (Bloomberg)
“As an industry player, you would think Ticketmaster would be prepared,” Skrmetti said while announcing his investigation into the matter. “Because they have a dominant position, they may have thought they didn’t need to worry about that. This could be an indicator that there’s not enough competition in the market.”
When Ticketmaster merged with Live Nation in 2010, they gained control over approximately 70% of the market for ticketing and live events. This is precisely why nearly 14 million fans tried accessing the same website all at once — they didn’t exactly have other options!
Variety reported that while 1.5 million users were able to purchase tickets immediately, around 2 million were put on a waitlist. Though the company claims to have been ready for a dense crowd, they ended up dealing with unprecedented numbers.
“Historically, working with Verified Fan invite codes has worked as we’ve been able to manage the volume coming into the site to shop for tickets,” Ticketmaster said. “However, this time the staggering number of bot attacks as well as fans who didn’t have invite codes drove unprecedented traffic on our site, resulting in 3.5 billion total system requests — 4x our previous peak.”
The company eventually sold the highest number of tickets for an artist in one day: two million!
Yet, this didn’t account for the 14 million people on the platform all at once. This giant cluster resulted in unloaded pages, timeouts, estimates of five-day-long queues and a great deal of inconvenience to those who weren’t using Ticketmaster to buy Taylor Swift tickets! (Consequence)
Though Ticketmaster and Live Nation aren’t facing any legal action yet, Skrmetti has cited a “severe lack of customer support” as his reason for scrutinizing whether Ticketmaster followed through on its promise to those who registered for presale.
Several politicians have also expressed severe disapproval of the ordeal.
In an interview with CNBC, part owner and chairman of Live Nation Greg Maffei said that there wasn’t anything Ticketmaster could have done to accommodate the traffic that came their way:
The reality is it’s a function of the massive demand that Taylor Swift has. The site was supposed to be opened up for 1.5 million verified Taylor Swift fans. We had 14 million people hit the site — including bots, another story, which are not supposed to be there — and despite all the challenges and the breakdowns, we did sell over 2 million tickets that day. We could’ve filled 900 stadiums. And the reality is this is not actually a Live Nation-promoted concert. Taylor Swift is promoted by one of our largest competitors. So though AOC may not like every element of our business, interestingly AEG — our competitor, who is the promoter for Taylor Swift — chose to use us because we are, in reality, the largest and most effective ticket seller in the world. Even our competitors want to come on our platform.
He then proceeded to attribute some responsibility for the problem to Taylor Swift herself: “Building capacity for peak demand is something we attempt to do, but this exceeded every expectation. And the reality is Taylor Swift hasn’t been on the road for three or four years, and that’s caused a huge issue.” (Stereogum)
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