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Swifties are seeing red and the US Senate’s taken swift action. Nope, not against the taxis snaking outside your concert venue price gouging your ride home. 🚕🚕🚕 But the alleged scalper-friendly folk who dominate US event ticket sales: Ticketmaster.
Live Nation Entertainment (LYV) owns the venue and event ticketing company, and they’ve been accused of having no incentive to make their ‘horrible’ customer experience any less horrible. 🥺 Senator Amy Klobuchar, who’s leading the anti-competitiveness hearing, says Ticketmaster’s near-monopoly means they don’t ‘face any pressure to continually innovate and improve’.
The botched Taylor Swift ticket rollout and Ticketmaster’s bot-blaming apology has left bad blood. 🩸 Tay-Tay wasn’t ready to shake it off, and expressed her delicate dismay in the socials at her Eras Tour ticket-issuing company - one that controls more than 80 percent of major concert venues in America. A total 3.5 billion system requests resulted in just 2.4 million tickets issued through Ticketmaster’s Verified Fan platform, for Capital One cardholders (COF), and Ashton Kutcher-backed SeatGeek, for the 52 show performances. 💳
While in 2018, Ticketmaster vehemently denied ‘secret deals’ with scalpers using Trade Desk (TTD) software - which allowed resellers to jump on ticket exchanges like eBay-owned (EBAY) StubHub - thousands of T-Swiz tickets were quickly listed on the marketplace for thousands of dollars, some cracking more than US$30,000 each. Karma hasn’t hit Ticketmaster though, which reported revenue increases this November following a record summer with 44 million fans attending 11,000 concerts in nearly 50 countries.
Ticketmaster courted controversy in August too with Springsteen’s boomer fans experiencing the brunt of ‘dynamic pricing’, with US$400 tickets surging to US$5,000 based on demand. But should Swifties leave artists like T-Swizzle off the hook? Dynamic pricing is set by promoters and the artists’ teams. 🤨
While Kiwi partiers heading to New Year’s RNV might not have been caught in Live Nation owned-Moshtix’s money machine, is it time to #breakupticketmaster? 💔
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