-Prisha Sussanne Sunkavalli
Taylor swift’s fans worldwide have been eagerly waiting for the day she comes out of exile and announces the dates of her next tour. The fans, popularly called ‘Swifties,’ have flooded the internet with posts and memes about her next time. The singer announced the dates of her next time, titled “The Eras,” to start on March 17th, 2023 spanning 52 cities across the United States. Fans waiting to see their favorite singer perform live faced a herculean challenge i.e: booking tickets online. Several users waited long hours to enter the booking phase only to be turned down as the tickets were sold out. Online booking platform Ticketmaster managed ticket sales for Swift’s tour and the company said extraordinary demand and a limited supply of tickets caused the problem.
Meanwhile, fans of the pop star are organizing a takedown of the platform even as U.S. Senators discuss plans to break down its monopoly. Ticketmaster, an American ticket sale and redistribution company, began the presale of tickets for Taylor Swift’s Eras tour on November 15th. The presale was open to Capital One cardholders, with queues lining up 15 minutes before the sale. However, long waiting periods and outages were among the significant complaints the company received soon after the deal was launched. There were around 14 million users on the site during the presale rush, and the company sold 2.4 million tickets, according to a report submitted by Vox. Fans who tried to buy tickets in mid-November had to wait hours and were reportedly locked out of online sales. They had to preregister on Ticketmaster and be designated Verified Fans, but it only helped a few. It is said that more than 2 million tickets were sold on November 15th, but Ticketmaster said that it had faced a ‘staggering number of bot attacks as well as fans who didn’t have codes’ to buy tickets, which resulted in 3.5 billion system requests. Taylor Swift raised her voice on this issue through a cryptic post on Instagram, quoting that she was “extremely protective of her fans” and that she had brought “so many elements of her career in-house to improve fan experiences.” She said that it was difficult for her to trust an outside entity with these relationships and loyalties and that it was “excruciating” for her to watch mistakes happen with no recourse. She stated they had asked the company multiple times if they could handle that kind of demand, and they were assured they could. Shortly following the incident, Ticketmaster publicly apologized to fans and the singer herself in a simple one-lined statement on Instagram. But this hadn’t stopped a group of 26 fans of the singer-songwriter Taylor Swift, from filing a lawsuit accusing Ticketmaster’s parent company of anti-competitive conduct and fraud several weeks after a chaotic sale, filled with glitches. The lawsuit, filed in the Superior Court of California in Los Angeles, charged the company with several antitrust violations, fraud, and breach of contract. The fans were among the millions of verified users who joined the presale event to purchase tickets for the upcoming tour. Still, they claim they lost out as bots, and unverified users flooded the Ticketmaster website during the November event, after which Ticketmaster canceled the general ticket sale. The lawsuit also accuses Ticketmaster of intentionally allowing bots and resellers into the presale event. They further accused the company of providing ticket codes to users, knowing full well that they could not meet the demand. The fans charged allegations against the company, stating that it dominated the market by forcing buyers to resell tickets on its secondary market, controlling prices by allying with its competitors, and fixing prices on the secondary market by controlling how much a buyer can resell at. The issue has been raised to a level where the United States Department of Justice has ordered an investigation into the company, and several U.S. Senators have also been discussing it. Although we do not know for sure what will happen next, what we do know, is that there is nothing Swifties do better than revenge.
The Echo 