Tag: ticketmaster
Amazon layoffs begin, Ticketmaster can’t handle Taylor Swift, and much of Twitter HQ quits
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Amazon layoffs begin, Ticketmaster can’t handle Taylor Swift, and much of Twitter HQ quits by Greg Kumparak originally published on TechCrunch
Ticketmaster Apologizes to Taylor Swift Over ‘Eras Tour’ Fiasco, Explains Issue with Unprecedented ‘Bot Attacks’
Taylor Swift‘s highly anticipated 2023 stadium jaunt – The Eras Tour – generated such incredible demand with its presale it set a record of 2 million tickets sold in one day, an event that’s become a nightmare for Ticketmaster.
Forcing the site to shut down sales due to ‘insufficient inventory,’ the fiasco left millions of Taylor fans (affectionately called #Swifties) in the cold –
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Ticketmaster issues formal apology to Taylor Swift and her fans for Eras Tour fiasco
Look what you made Ticketmaster do.
The ticketing service has released a statement addressing the bungled sale of tickets to Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour saying, “we want to apologize to Taylor and all of her fans – especially those who had a terrible experience trying to purchase tickets.”
For those who haven’t been following the chaos, here’s a brief rundown. Ticketmaster canceled the general sale of tickets to Swift’s first tour since 2018 this past Thursday after rescheduling the Capital One cardholder sale. On top of that, the service was unprepared to deal with the volume of fans trying to purchase tickets through the Verified Fan presale this past Monday. The Ticketmaster website crashed ahead of the Verified Fan presale and fans endured hours-long queues with some getting an error message when they finally reached the front of the line.
“We estimate about 15% of interactions across the site experienced issues, and that’s 15% too many, including passcode validation errors that caused fans to lose tickets they had carted,” the press release reads.
Ticketmaster blamed “unprecedented traffic” on the site due to bots and fans without presale codes for the issues with the site during the Verified Fan presale.
In their lengthy statement, Ticketmaster runs through the numbers that informed their approach to the Eras Tour. It reports that 3.5 million people registered for the Verified Fan presale — the largest registration in its history. Around 1.5 million fans received presale codes and 2 million tickets were sold during the Verified Fan presale breaking their record for the most tickets sold in a day.
Yesterday, Swift broke her silence on the debacle in a statement on her Instagram story. The Midnights singer wrote, “we asked them, multiple times, if they could handle this kind of demand and we were assured they would.”
Hopefully, the story of Swift and Ticketmaster might be ending soon.
The Taylor Swift Chaos Is a Reckoning for Ticketmaster
The DOJ was reportedly investigating Ticketmaster before the Taylor Swift debacle
The Department of Justice has reportedly opened an antitrust investigation into Live Nation, the parent of Ticketmaster, to determine if the company has abused its power in the live music industry. The investigation is said to have been ongoing over the last several months. The New York Times reported on the investigation after Taylor Swift and Bruce Springsteen fans had an excessively difficult time trying to buy tickets for those artists’ tours.
The DOJ’s antitrust division has been asking music venues and stakeholders in the ticketing market about the industry and Live Nation’s practices, according to the report. The agency is said to be looking into whether Live Nation holds a monopoly in the live music space.
The company owns and/or operates many venues, including the House of Blues, and it runs festivals like Lollapalooza and Download. It sells tickets to those places and events through Ticketmaster. Live Nation also manages dozens of notable artists.
Live Nation and Ticketmaster merged in 2010 after gaining approval from the DOJ. The agency imposed some conditions on the deal, such as Live Nation having to sell some parts of its business. For a 10-year period, Live Nation was prohibited from threatening to keep tours away from venues that don’t use Ticketmaster. In 2019, the DOJ determined that Live Nation broke that condition, and it extended the merger agreement provision period to 2025.
Bringing things up to date, Swifties (and bots) crashed Ticketmaster on Tuesday as they attempted to snag tickets for the megastar’s first tour in five years during a pre-sale. Ticketmaster said a load of more than 3.5 billion system requests caused havoc.
“The site was supposed to open up for 1.5 million verified Taylor Swift fans,” Greg Maffei, the CEO of Live Nation’s biggest shareholder Liberty Media, told CNBC. “We had 14 million people hit the site, including bots, which are not supposed to be there.”
Fans waited in queues for hours and when they were finally able to select a seat, many were still unable to grab tickets. In many cases, tickets were essentially snatched out of customers’ hands as they tried to put them in their cart. A general sale for the remaining tickets was supposed to take place on Friday, but Ticketmaster canceled it “due to extraordinarily high demands on ticketing systems and insufficient remaining ticket inventory to meet that demand.”
The chaos led to calls to break up Live Nation, including from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Sens. Richard Blumenthal and Amy Klobuchar expressed concern over ” the state of competition in the ticketing industry,” as Reuters notes.
Daily reminder that Ticketmaster is a monopoly, it’s merger with LiveNation should never have been approved, and they need to be reigned in.
Break them up.
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) November 15, 2022
“I’m not going to make excuses for anyone because we asked them, multiple times, if they could handle this kind of demand and we were assured they could,” Swift wrote in an Instagram Story on Friday. “It’s truly amazing that 2.4 million people got tickets, but it really pisses me off that a lot of them feel like they went through several bear attacks to get them.”
This is far from the first time people had a chaotic experience while trying to get tickets to see a major artist. Blink-182 and Paramore tours sold out almost instantly. Ticketmaster’s controversial dynamic pricing system led to some fans paying thousands of dollars for Bruce Springsteen tickets — even before those sought-after tickets hit secondary markets.
Engadget has contacted Live Nation for comment. The Department of Justice doesn’t comment on ongoing investigations.
Taylor Swift On Ticketmaster Tour Fiasco: “It Really P*sses Me Off”
Taylor Swift has broken her silence about the chaos surrounding tickets for her upcoming trek, ‘The Eras Tour.’
And the songbird says the drama is “really p*ssing me off.”
Full story below…
With demand for the tour at an all-time high following the release of Swift’s record-breaking new album ‘Midnights,’ Ticketmaster rolled out a pre-verified system so as to accommodate the masses looking to snap up seats to the stadium trek.
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