Taylor Swift Tour Causes New Wave Of Criticism Against Ticketmaster
Taylor Swift’s Tour Leads to More Criticism of Ticketmaster Swift hasn’t had a meaningful tour since 2018 due to the pandemic. She has now produced four whole new albums, most recently “Midnights,” in addition to re-recorded and expanded editions of her previous albums “Fearless” and “Red.” There is a lot of unmet fan demand and a lot of stuff that hasn’t been performed live.
Swift recently revealed that her Eras tour, which will take place in America’s top stadiums next year, will feature excellent openers including Paramore, Muna, and Phoebe Bridgers. The crowd continued to go crazy. Some Swift followers said that by performing on the same day as their wedding, Swift had ruined their big day. According to reports, hotels canceled reservations of people who had reserved a block of rooms for their wedding guests because they believed they could charge Swift concert goers much more.
But now that tickets are formally on sale, additional confusion has emerged, and Live Nation (LYV) and Ticketmaster are once again receiving a beating on social media. Swift’s 52-date Eras tour tickets recently went on sale, but fans were in for a shock when they went to Ticketmaster. As part of a mechanism Ticketmaster implemented to ward off scalpers and bots, pre-sale tickets were only supposed to be available to verified Swift fans. But those customers had to wait a long time in line at Ticketmaster, and the website seems to have crashed more than once.
In a statement, the firm claimed that historically unparalleled demand had led to “intermittent issues” that they were “urgently” attempting to resolve.
The verified-fans system was designed to discourage scalpers, but it doesn’t appear to have been effective as tickets started to appear on the ticket exchange StubHub, which is owned by eBay, right away. Floor seats at East Rutherford, New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium, were going for up to $21,600, and many other dates showed tickets going for five figures. However, if you want to be charitable, there are deals to be had because nosebleed seats for the performance cost $350.
General admission tickets for the tour, which begins on March 17 in Glendale, Arizona, started at $49, while VIP packages started at $199. Fans who purchased tickets for hotly anticipated events like BTS, the Blink-182 reunion tour, and Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band’s tour the following year were shocked to learn about and outraged by Ticketmaster’s new “dynamic pricing model,” which sees prices for so-called platinum tickets fluctuate based on demand, similar to surge pricing for Uber.
Paul McCartney, Bad Bunny, and Harry Styles have used this model on their tours, and the more people see it, the more they detest it. Dynamic pricing, though, doesn’t appear to be the root of the sticker shock in ticket prices, at least not right now. A StubHub spokesperson told CNN that some tickets were available for $150, with the average ticket costing in the range of $600. Because this was a pre-sale, the demand should decline once the official sale starts.
Taylor Swift Fans Are Not Happy With Ticketmaster
Since the establishment of Ticketmaster in 1976, customers have been dissatisfied with the company’s service charges. At the height of its fame, the alternative rock band Pearl Jam complained to the US Department of Justice in 1994. In a dispute over costs, Pearl Jam claimed the organization had excluded them from venue bookings. This prompted an investigation into what the Los Angeles Times called “potential anti-competitive activities,” but eventually no serious action was taken against the organization. The band initially refused to sell tickets through the firm but later gave up because it was really the only option for big-name acts.
Most of America’s major music halls have exclusive arrangements with Ticketmaster and its parent firm, Live Nation Entertainment (the two companies merged in 2009), although other smaller venues sell tickets directly on their own websites or via more niche services like Eventbrite. However, the corporation is experiencing a persistent public relations issue as a result of its dominance, lack of alternatives, and rising ticket prices for large tours. This is because practically every announcement of a major tour is met with a reaction on Twitter.
The outcry against Ticketmaster has been particularly loud, with younger fans complaining about long wait times, older music fans saying that we should have listened to Eddie Vedder and company, and several lawmakers calling for Ticketmaster and LiveNation to be investigated or possibly broken up. Taylor Swift fans, or “Swifites,” as they are known, are some of the most devoted people in all of pop music.