The notorious ticket peddling service Ticketmaster has never been a fan favorite, and anyone who's ever bought a concert ticket there can attest to why. Preposterous prices, slimy junk fees, and terrible customer service are just a few of its mundane evils. In spite of how universally reviled it is, Ticketmaster has persisted as the king of the box office. But now, it's facing its worst PR nightmare in years — and that's saying something. Why? It made the fatal error of pissing off Taylor Swift fans, or "Swifties."
Swift's "Eras Tour," which will have her perform at over 50 venues in the US alone, is set to be one of the biggest music events on the planet. Biding their time, her fiercely loyal fanbase — probably the largest of any single artist and easily the most vocal online — have been waiting since 2018 for her next headlining tour. So, looking to guarantee a spot, many of them signed up for Ticketmaster's Verified Fans program, a system which was supposed to only allow a select amount of around 1.5 million real fans — as opposed to scalper bots — to buy tickets ahead of time.
It didn't work. Ticketmaster CEO Michael Rapino told The Hollywood Reporter that around 14 million users, some of them bots, rushed to buy pre-sale tickets this week, and it pretty much broke the service. Parts of the website immediately crashed, leaving millions either waiting for hours or suffering through a miserable, glitchy experience — only for some to be told they couldn't buy a ticket anyway even though they were verified. In total, Ticketmaster was barraged with 3.5 billion system requests, which is nearly half the population of the Earth and four times its previous peak.
Even with all the difficulties, it did manage to sell around two million tickets — but it's unclear how many of those went to actual, verified Swifties and how many went to scalpers.
And we suspect that Ticketmaster has made way more than that in the form of enemies. Search its name on social media right now, and you'll be returned with swarms of complaints from ardent Swifties and Ticketmaster haters crawling out of the woodwork.
To make matters worse, the maligned seller abruptly informed fans via Twitter that it would be canceling the sale of tickets to the general public originally planned for Friday, "due to extraordinarily high demands on ticketing systems and insufficient remaining ticket inventory to meet that demand."
With Ticketmaster shutting its doors, vulturous resellers who gobbled up tickets during the presale pandemonium remain the only alternative for fans, selling them at outrageous amounts as high as $28,000, Reuters reports.
Exceptionally crummy service isn't exactly a scandal in itself, but the magnitude of Ticketmaster's mishandling of the situation — and the blatant scalping it's enabled — has brought significant attention to the company's nefarious practices and its stranglehold on the market.
Now, politicians are jumping on the Swifties' grievances to call for Ticketmaster's head.
"Daily reminder that Ticketmaster is a monopoly, [its] merger with LiveNation should never have been approved, and they need to be [reined] in," said Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), in a tweet. "Break them up."
"It's no secret that Live Nation-Ticketmaster is an unchecked monopoly," echoed Rep. David N. Cicilline (D-RI), the chair of the House Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law.
"The merger of these companies should never have been allowed in the first place," Cicilline added, stating that he's joining others to call on the Department of Justice (DOJ) to "investigate LiveNation’s efforts to jack up prices and strangle competition."
Ticketmaster was already a behemoth in the 90s when Pearl Jam — then one of the biggest bands in the world — tried to take them on. Eddie Vedder and his bandmates certainly made the concert corporation sweat for a time, but since then, it's only grown. In 2010, it merged with LiveNation, once its largest competitor and now Ticketmaster's parent company. Critics, like AOC and Cicilline, argue that this merger was in blatant violation of antitrust laws.
Monopolistic behavior aside, as well as frequently bullying artists and venues to give into its tyrannical demands, consumers don't have to dig very far to realize Ticketmaster is ripping them off. Buy a ticket on there and it could charge you a significant portion of the ticket price in service and other junk fees.
Another culprit? Its dynamic pricing model, infamously used in other industries like airline tickets and hotels, in which prices are continuously adjusted in real time based on demand. As a result, ticket prices are not made public before a sale begins. In theory, dynamic pricing is meant to make predatory resellers obsolete by keeping prices competitive. But really, it's just a good excuse for Ticketmaster to match its prices with that of ludicrous resellers and pocket the extra cash.
Furthermore, at least one 2018 investigation by CBC found that Ticketmaster was quietly recruiting professional scalpers into its reseller program, and turned a blind eye to them using hundreds of fake accounts to sell tickets.
Bearing all that in mind, you'd think Swift would speak up about the most recent fiasco over her tour.
And for a while, she didn't, driving fans frantic over her silence — which she's finally broken.
On Friday, Swift spoke out in a carefully worded statement on her Instagram.
"Well, it goes without saying that I’m extremely protective of my fans," she began. "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 is clearly alluding to Ticketmaster here, and euphemistically summed up the situation as there being "a multitude of reasons why people had such a hard time trying to get tickets" — though she never specifically names the corporation.
Diplomatic as the words may be, they've dropped at the perfect moment, because The New York Times reports that the DOJ has opened an antitrust investigation over LiveNation's ownership of Ticketmaster (though at press time, official confirmation is still pending.)
Could this be the beginning of the end of the company's unfettered dominance? Maybe. Ticketmaster and LiveNation only seem to get stronger with the more bad PR they get. So taking them down? It'll take more than online outrage. However, with Swift looking poised to join the fight alongside the DOJ, maybe this time around the concert conglomerate will get a run for its money.
More on Taylor Swift: Taylor Swift Reportedly Threatened Microsoft Over Racist Chatbot
The post Ticketmaster May Have Finally Met Its Match: Furious Swifties appeared first on Futurism.
Continued here:
Ticketmaster May Have Finally Met Its Match: Furious Swifties
- Learning to Live Sustainably on the Red Planet: Habitat Mars - Universe Today - July 3rd, 2020 [July 3rd, 2020]
- NASA, China and the UAE are scheduled to send missions to Mars in July | TheHill - The Hill - July 12th, 2020 [July 12th, 2020]
- A Look Into The Wild Economy Of Tabletop Board Game Funding - NPR - July 12th, 2020 [July 12th, 2020]
- Adventure Time: Distant Lands Premiere BMO the Hero - Show Snob - July 14th, 2020 [July 14th, 2020]
- Terraforming Mars on the App Store - July 23rd, 2020 [July 23rd, 2020]
- China successfully launches its first space mission that will attempt to land on Mars - Explica - July 24th, 2020 [July 24th, 2020]
- Perseverance Rover Launches on July 30, Here's How to Watch - autoevolution - July 27th, 2020 [July 27th, 2020]
- The Expanse Season 5: Cast, Plot, Release And Everything You Want To Know! - World Top Trend - July 28th, 2020 [July 28th, 2020]
- Alien Life Dwelling Beneath the Surface of Mars? New Theory Emerges - Webby Feed - July 29th, 2020 [July 29th, 2020]
- Bottom Line: Quarterstaff Games Stays Alive for the Next Level of the Pandemic - Seven Days - July 31st, 2020 [July 31st, 2020]
- Mars: Oodles of facts, figures and fun questions about the Red Planet - BBC Focus Magazine - August 2nd, 2020 [August 2nd, 2020]
- Pandemic Legacy, the Board-Game Series for the Age of the Coronavirus - The New Yorker - August 2nd, 2020 [August 2nd, 2020]
- Conquer the solar system in the upcoming game Solar Expanse . Drop asteroids, terraform, and plan rocket flights to eventually explore the entire... - August 4th, 2020 [August 4th, 2020]
- NASAs Curiosity Rover Reaches an Impressive Milestone During its Mars Mission - Webby Feed - August 8th, 2020 [August 8th, 2020]
- Terraforming of Mars - Wikipedia - August 9th, 2020 [August 9th, 2020]
- Mars covered in oceans: what terraformation on the Red Planet might look like - ZME Science - August 10th, 2020 [August 10th, 2020]
- Cool! Heres how Venus would look as a water world - EarthSky - September 6th, 2020 [September 6th, 2020]
- Longtime Literature Professor, Noted Poet Begins Next Chapter with Retirement - University of Texas at Dallas - September 6th, 2020 [September 6th, 2020]
- Don't ignore Venus Earth's twin hides surprising opportunities (op-ed) - Space.com - September 6th, 2020 [September 6th, 2020]
- Destination Red Planet: For space buffs, this summer has brought multiple Mars bound space launches - The Times of India Blog - September 6th, 2020 [September 6th, 2020]
- We asked Kim Stanley Robinson: Can science fiction save us? - TheWestNews - October 28th, 2020 [October 28th, 2020]
- We are proud and excited to announce that Terraformers is now part of the Goblinz line up! - Gamasutra - October 28th, 2020 [October 28th, 2020]
- The Expanse Season 4 Recap: Ilus, the Ring Gates and the Cliffhanger Ending - Den of Geek - December 5th, 2020 [December 5th, 2020]
- Kim Stanley Robinson: The Science Fiction of Right Now - Highsnobiety - December 5th, 2020 [December 5th, 2020]
- 9 of the best board games to play for fans of science and tech - New Scientist - December 5th, 2020 [December 5th, 2020]
- All of the best Mac and iOS Christmas app deals - 9to5Toys - December 28th, 2020 [December 28th, 2020]
- Elon Musk Terraforming Mars: He Says We Need 'Glass Domes ... - December 27th, 2021 [December 27th, 2021]
- Space-themed board game Terraforming Mars and its ... - December 27th, 2021 [December 27th, 2021]
- Why Earth is habitable but Venus looks like hell - Big Think - December 27th, 2021 [December 27th, 2021]
- Terraforming Mars Ares Expedition Review - Just Push Start - January 11th, 2022 [January 11th, 2022]
- Was Voltaire the First Sci-Fi Author? - WIRED - January 11th, 2022 [January 11th, 2022]
- Terraforming - Stellaris Wiki - April 28th, 2022 [April 28th, 2022]
- Terraforming Mars (board game) - Wikipedia - April 28th, 2022 [April 28th, 2022]
- That "Research" About How Smartphones Are Causing Deformed Human Bodies Is SEO Spam, You Idiots - November 4th, 2022 [November 4th, 2022]
- Chinese Spaceplane Releases Mystery Object Into Orbit - November 4th, 2022 [November 4th, 2022]
- AOC Says Her Twitter Account Broke After She Made Fun of Elon Musk - November 4th, 2022 [November 4th, 2022]
- Huge Drone Swarm to Form Giant Advertisement Over NYC Skyline - November 4th, 2022 [November 4th, 2022]
- Hackers Just Took Down One of the World's Most Advanced Telescopes - November 4th, 2022 [November 4th, 2022]
- Jeff Bezos' Housekeeper Says She Had to Climb Out the Window to Use the Bathroom - November 4th, 2022 [November 4th, 2022]
- China Plans to Send Monkeys to Space Station to Have Sex With Each Other - November 4th, 2022 [November 4th, 2022]
- US Gov to Crack Down on "Bossware" That Spies On Employees' Computers - November 4th, 2022 [November 4th, 2022]
- Cats May Be Tampering With Crime Scenes, Scientists Say - November 4th, 2022 [November 4th, 2022]
- Elon Musk Meeting With Advertisers, Begging Them Not to Leave Twitter - November 4th, 2022 [November 4th, 2022]
- Scientists Found a Way to Control How High Mice Got on Cocaine - November 4th, 2022 [November 4th, 2022]
- Scientists Spot "Stripped, Pulsating Core" of Star Caused By Horrific Accident - November 4th, 2022 [November 4th, 2022]
- Scientists Use Actual Lunar Soil Sample to Create Rocket Fuel - November 4th, 2022 [November 4th, 2022]
- NASA Sets Launch Date for Mission to $10 Quintillion Asteroid - November 4th, 2022 [November 4th, 2022]
- This Deepfake AI Singing Dolly Parton's "Jolene" Is Worryingly Good - November 4th, 2022 [November 4th, 2022]
- Twitter Working on Plan to Charge Users to Watch Videos - November 4th, 2022 [November 4th, 2022]
- Greta Thunberg Says UN Climate Conference Is a Scam and She's Not Attending - November 4th, 2022 [November 4th, 2022]
- There's Something Strange About How These Stars Are Moving, Scientists Say - November 4th, 2022 [November 4th, 2022]
- Manslaughter Case Has a Strange Twist: Tesla That Killed Couple Was on Autopilot - November 4th, 2022 [November 4th, 2022]
- Tesla Reportedly Canceling Solar Roof Installations Across the Country - November 12th, 2022 [November 12th, 2022]
- A Tesla Executive Under Investigation Is Now Working at SpaceX for Some Reason - November 12th, 2022 [November 12th, 2022]
- Elon Musk Might Get Thrashed by Lawsuit From Heavy Metal Drummer - November 12th, 2022 [November 12th, 2022]
- Unexploded Shell Removed From Soldier's Chest by Surgeons Wearing Body Armor - November 12th, 2022 [November 12th, 2022]
- Chinese Space Debris Crashes Down in the Philippines - November 12th, 2022 [November 12th, 2022]
- Divers Discover Fragment of Challenger Space Shuttle Under Ocean - November 12th, 2022 [November 12th, 2022]
- NASA Disputes Calling Its Inflatable Heat Shield a "Bouncy Castle" - November 12th, 2022 [November 12th, 2022]
- Scientists Reproduce Fascinating, Powerful Material Found in Meteorite - November 12th, 2022 [November 12th, 2022]
- Elon Musk Says That Under His Brilliant New Management, Twitter May Go Out of Business - November 12th, 2022 [November 12th, 2022]
- Divers Growing Veggies in Underwater Greenhouses - November 12th, 2022 [November 12th, 2022]
- Tesla Issues Software Patch So That Its Cars Don't Lose Power Steering on Potholes - November 12th, 2022 [November 12th, 2022]
- NASA Releases Hubble Images of Star Right as It Explodes - November 12th, 2022 [November 12th, 2022]
- Furious Fire Ants "Rain Down" on Hawaiian Residents and Bite Them in their Sleep - November 12th, 2022 [November 12th, 2022]
- NASA Inspecting Moon Rocket for Damage From Hurricane Nicole - November 12th, 2022 [November 12th, 2022]
- NASA Fixes Months-Long Issue With James Webb Telescope - November 12th, 2022 [November 12th, 2022]
- Amazing Video Shows What the ISS Would Look Like If It Flew at the Height of a Jetplane - November 12th, 2022 [November 12th, 2022]
- Amazing Map Lets You Scroll Through the Entire Known Universe - November 20th, 2022 [November 20th, 2022]
- So Many People Are Using a Diabetes Drug for Weight Loss That Actual Diabetics Are Having Trouble Getting It - November 20th, 2022 [November 20th, 2022]
- Behind the Lawsuit Against Celebs Who Shilled FTX Before Its Spectacular Meltdown - November 20th, 2022 [November 20th, 2022]
- Twitter Claims Video of Moon Rocket Launch Is Revenge Porn - November 20th, 2022 [November 20th, 2022]
- Elon Musk Locks Twitter Employees Out Office, Then Asks Them to Meet Him on the 10th Floor - November 20th, 2022 [November 20th, 2022]
- Experts Excoriate NASA Report Claiming James Webb Wasn't Homophobic - November 20th, 2022 [November 20th, 2022]
- NASA Tells Astronauts That Tweeting Isn't As Important as Staying Alive - November 20th, 2022 [November 20th, 2022]
- NASA Orders Press Not to Photograph Launch Site After Moon Mission Takes Off - November 20th, 2022 [November 20th, 2022]
- Experts Baffled by Why NASA’s “Red Crew” Wear Blue Shirts - November 20th, 2022 [November 20th, 2022]
- Panicked Elon Musk Reportedly Begging Engineers Not to Leave - November 20th, 2022 [November 20th, 2022]
- NASA Drops Stunning New James Webb Image of a Star Being Born - November 20th, 2022 [November 20th, 2022]
- Celebrities' Bored Apes Are Hilariously Worthless Now - November 20th, 2022 [November 20th, 2022]