The Errors Tour — EMBODIED

by Laura Zion

During Harry Styles’ Love on Tour, earlier this year, I repeatedly found myself looking at Instagram and asking, “Didn't she see him last week, too?” With how ridiculous the demand to see Styles live was, it seemed impossible. How did this girl attend the entirety of Styles’ residency at Madison Square Garden? How is it that, now, she’s managed to get a code and a ticket to Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour, but I haven’t even remotely reached the threshold? Do these people’s parents have connections to the Live Nation-Ticketmaster monopoly? Are they just that dedicated to seeing them live? Or is the system simply rigged?

Scoring tickets to the biggest musicians in America has always been difficult. How we buy those tickets, however, has dramatically changed. If you’re lucky enough to make it inside the stadium, it will probably feel worth it— but arriving there is definitely not easy, exemplified by the masses of parents and fans who are unable to get tickets to these shows, whether because of exorbitant pricing strategies or limited and unfair access. The excessive demand is an excuse for the struggle to buy tickets, sure. Attending a Styles or Swift concert doesn’t require the same process you’d undergo to see your Tisch classmate perform at a local East Village venue. But to what extent is demand at fault? The fiasco surrounding Swift’s Eras Tour exposes a broken system that began with the merger of Ticketmaster and Live Nation in 2010.

Whether you’re a Swiftie superfan, NFL diehard or an avid Broadway-goer, attempting to see your favorite artist now requires a lengthy and excruciating process. Under Ticketmaster’s “Verified Fan” system, first fans must register for a presale, a lottery with the prize being a magical code only making you eligible to participate in the sale. This procedure was the beginning of the The Eras Tour meltdown.

If you made it this far, you received a special code and should be able to make a transaction. The next step is pounding the refresh button hundreds of times within several minutes, praying to hit the second lottery until finally allowed to buy a ticket. That is unless the ticket suddenly disappears from your shopping cart or the website crashes. Many Swifties waited hours at their computer for entry to the sale. The lucky ones (pun intended) earn the privilege of being at the mercy of companies that will charge them whatever and however it pleases. Most of us who are not so fortunate turn to the resale market, facing considerable if not exponential markups on the face value of a ticket.

Since the Reputation Stadium Tour in 2018, Swift has released four new albums and two re-recorded albums. There are dozens of new songs, previously unreleased “From the Vault” tracks, remixes and acoustic versions, many of which have not been performed live yet. The immense new material, the return to concerts post-pandemic and Swift’s decision to present her tour as what she called “a journey through all of my musical eras of my career,” all contributed to the extraordinary ticket demand. Ticketmaster claimed there was “unprecedented traffic on our site, resulting in 3.5 billion total system requests – 4x our previous peak.” They were supposedly readily prepared for the expected demand, but issued more codes than tickets available. Why create more entry points than capacity?

Ultimately, Ticketmaster canceled the public sale altogether “[d]ue to extraordinarily high demands and insufficient remaining ticket inventory.” The “Verified Fan” system was “designed to help manage high demand shows—identifying real humans and weeding out bots,” through required registrations for presales. Yet in Ticketmaster’s recent statement, they said that “a staggering number of bot attacks” during the presale was partially responsible for the general cancellation. If fans weren’t frustrated enough, this only escalated the chaos. The Eras Tour tickets are now going for thousands of dollars in the resale market because of the cancellation. For Styles’ “Love On Tour, influencer and model Tara Lynn said on TikTok that she recently spent $10,000 for two tickets to one of his Los Angeles shows. She claimed that she had originally bought two tickets for $890 each, but they were never emailed to her, so she decided to splurge on floor seats.

Once upon a time, instead of online codes, fans slept outside record stores and parking lots with wristbands that held their place in the ticket line for The Rolling Stones, Prince and other icons. Back in the day, my dad would go to the venue box office or to Ticketron machines (bought by Ticketmaster in 1990) located at record stores around Manhattan. It wasn’t easy, but there was a greater element of fairness involved. There were always resellers and fans with connections making it harder to get tickets for some, but certainly not a raffle for a code to even earn the eligibility to purchase. The point of The Eras Tour presale was to ensure dedicated Swift fans had a fair chance at buying tickets, but it seems to have done the opposite. Although Ticketmaster has attempted to block bots and ticket brokers, it is unlikely that all illegal activity is even being identified. Since the federal Better Online Ticket Sales (BOTS) Act was enacted in 2016, there has been one set of prosecutions.

Ticketmaster is a monopoly at heart. The company has extensive leverage if not outright control over ticket prices, added fees and which venues will even be part of the tour. Ample evidence demonstrates that the 2010 merger of Ticketmaster and Live Nation Entertainment allowed them to abuse their power over the years. Live Nation has coerced concert venues into using Ticketmaster as a condition of booking major musicians, in defiance of a previous district court ruling. To make matters worse, Ticketmaster, like banks and airlines, add various “junk fees” that make up large amounts of the total price— a practice that President Joe Biden last month directed the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to restrain. Federal antitrust regulators never should have permitted the merger of Live Nation and Ticketmaster, and should definitely look to break up the company.

In addition to this monopolistic system, regular fans must face off against “holdbacks.” “Holdbacks” are when ticketing companies presell or reserve tickets for the well-connected and other insiders. These tickets are typically reserved for VIPs, “friends and family,” and platinum credit card holders, among others. It is likely that at Swift’s 52 upcoming shows, thousands of tickets will be “held back” and never released to the general public. According to a report compiled by the New York Attorney General's Office, 54% of tickets to top-grossing New York shows between 2012-2015 were not reserved for the general public.

Since the Ticketmaster meltdown, there have been renewed calls from lawmakers to break up the Live Nation-Ticketmaster monopoly—including, but not limited to, Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and David N. Cicilline of Rhode Island. The Justice Department has also opened an antitrust investigation to look into whether Live Nation has abused its power in the live music industry.

After three days of silence, Swift posted a temporary message to her Instagram story:

Although not naming Ticketmaster directly, Swift made it clear she was not happy with the way things went down. Ticketmaster has blamed the situation on Swift’s sheer popularity, which definitely played a major role in the competition for tickets. But Swifties can only be blamed so much. The system is flawed, starting with the “Verified Fan” process. Rather than increasing fairness, it increases competition and dismisses the need for a general sale entirely. Coupled with the behind the scenes holdback of tickets, the monopolistic nature of Ticketmaster is almost guaranteed to create chaos. Ticketmaster’s message to fans is clear: you’re on your own, kid.