The Swiftie uprising is imminent
If you’ve used the internet at all this week (and considering you’re reading this newsletter, there’s a good chance you have), you’ve probably seen something about Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, as presales have been taking place via Ticketmaster for the past few days.
Dear readers: while you were partying (seeing throwaway tweets or news articles about the ticketing debacle), I studied the blade (have been knee-deep in #SwiftTok), so here’s a rundown of what exactly went wrong, who Swifties are mad at, and what they’re saying online.
Some background info before we start
Ticketmaster and Live Nation merged in 2009, effectively creating a monopoly where one company controls access to the majority of tickets for any given event. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez even tweeted about it:
Pearl Jam protested against Ticketmaster’s ever-growing monopoly way back in 1995 to mixed results. From a 1995 article in Rolling Stone:
“Ticketmaster’s exclusive contracts were invisible to consumers until Pearl Jam raised the issue. The brainchild of Ticketmaster CEO Fred Rosen is simple: Inflate service fees, particularly for concert tickets, into the $4 to $6 range, then offer 20 percent of Ticketmaster’s profits for the entire year at a particular location – as much as $500,000 - if the venue agrees to use Ticketmaster exclusively. In Chicago, for example, a band can’t play the Rosemont Horizon, the United Center, Soldier Field, the Arie Crown Theater or the New World Music Theater - the major venues in the city – unless they agree to have Ticketmaster sell and distribute tickets for shows at those venues. What’s more, many venues have stopped staffing their own box offices for concerts since no service fees are generated at those sites.”
By refusing to use Ticketmaster, Pearl Jam was locked out of countless venues, and ended up selling tickets through a newer and smaller company for shows at fairgrounds and soccer fields in locations that were… off-the-beaten track, to say the least. The majority of their tour ended up getting cancelled, anyway, and Pearl Jam’s failed fight against Ticketmaster was largely forgotten by much of the public, until now. (Fun fact: Pearl Jam is currently trending on Twitter as a result of renewed interest in their fight against Ticketmaster.)
So what went wrong?
Ticketmaster announced a few hours ago that the general sale for Swift’s Eras Tour was cancelled due to “extraordinarily high demands and insufficient remaining ticket inventory”.
In a statement that has since been deleted, Ticketmaster claimed that “bot attacks” were largely to blame (text via Rolling Stone):
“Historically, working with Verified Fan invite codes has worked as we’ve been able to manage the volume coming into the site to shop for tickets. However, this time the staggering number of bot attacks as well as fans who didn’t have invite codes drove unprecedented traffic on our site, resulting in 3.5 billion total system requests – 4x our previous peak.”
The statement also included the claim that in order for Swift to meet demand, she would need to perform over 900 stadium shows.
The Live Nation Entertainment (the entity that was formed after the merger) chairman appeared on CNBC on Thursday and tried to argue that the blame lay with Swift - she is simply too famous.
From what I’ve seen from Swifties, they cite a number of factors:
The failed Verified Fan system: Instead of ensuring presale codes got into the hands of “verified fans”, the Verified Fan system appeared to be entirely random (anecdotally, I’ve seen dozens of videos where a fan’s brother/boyfriend/parents received a Verified Fan presale code and they didn’t).
This is in contrast to the system Swift used during her Reputation tour, where fans could “boost” their chances at buying face-value tickets by doing things like buying merch, following Swift on social media, or watching her music videos on YouTube. This week’s debacle has left many fans nostalgic for that system; while it was an obvious attempt to drive up album and merch sales and use her fans to help her promote her album, many fans were going to be doing all of those things anyway. This system had the added bonus of weeding out scalpers, who would be less likely to spend real time and money trying to improve their chances at nabbing tickets.
Dynamic pricing: Ticketmaster’s dynamic pricing system has been criticised before, but things have really come to a head with the Eras Tour. Dynamic pricing is basically Uber surge pricing but for concert tickets, meaning that as the algorithm detects an increase in demand, it increases the cost of tickets. Yes, what I am describing is indeed what scalpers do (and are doing currently to Swifties), but now Ticketmaster has taken their methods and made them their own. Dynamic pricing meant that while some quick fans were able to grab seats for $300, others were shown the same seats for $755. Experts have pointed out that while Ticketmaster is implementing dynamic pricing, artists are ultimately the ones who give Ticketmaster the OK to do so.
Ticket allocation: A general sale being cancelled because almost all of the tickets were sold during the presale is practically unheard of, because sellers usually only allocate a certain % of seats to the presale. This was obviously not the case here.
Lack of transparency around ticket packages: Fans didn’t know until they had made it to the end of the queue and were buying tickets what packages were available or how much to expect to pay for them. Weirder still, a huge number of seats were tagged as VIP, including less-than-amazing seats in the upper bowl of some venues.
What this fan feared is what came to pass for many - I watched several TikTok livestreams of fans buying tickets where the fan panicked, bought whatever they could, and ended up spending much more than they had planned. The lack of information going in (an economist on TikTok taught me this is called “asymmetric information”) combined with dynamic pricing and exorbitant Ticketmaster fees meant that a lot of fans blew their budgets trying to secure tickets. Others managed to let cooler heads prevail and told themselves they’d wait until the general sale, only to now be told that is no longer an option.
How have Taylor and her team responded?
By promoting a fifth remix of her first single from her latest album.
Last week, Swift released four remixes of “Anti-Hero”, including one featuring producer Jack Antonoff’s band. Her team’s response to the mess that was this week being to release yet another remix is incredibly funny to me. Might I recommend reading the room?
What are Swifties saying?
While some fans are bending over backwards to defend Swift from any and all criticisms, going so far as to invent situations out of whole cloth, others are burning with righteous fury.
While some are telling newly-radicalised Swifties “I told you so”, others are just glad that they’ve finally realised that Swift is a capitalist first and foremost.
There are others still who are straight-up admitting to being part of the problem and gouging their fellow fans, which is a bold strategy considering how angry people are right now.
I have seen more negative TikToks about Swift in the past 24 hours than ever before, including when the news of her over-reliance on her private jet broke. Fans are mad at Ticketmaster, yes, but others have also realised that Swift had options she didn’t take: she didn’t turn off dynamic pricing, she didn’t implement a system that actually ensured tickets would get into the hands of fans, and, most of all, she hasn’t communicated with her fans throughout all of this.
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For a star like Swift who has tried desperately to seem accessible to her fans (e.g. by holding intimate shows for fans, or by not selling meet and greet tickets but selecting fans from the audience or from social media to meet her backstage) the lack of direct communication with fans as they’ve driven themselves insane trying to buy tickets feels like violently rubbing salt in their bleeding wounds.
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Older music fans have been spreading knowledge of Pearl Jam’s attempts at standing up to Ticketmaster, clearly hoping that fans would realise that if anyone could succeed where Pearl Jam failed, it would be Taylor Alison Swift. And it’s worked, somewhat - I learned about Pearl Jam’s fight against Ticketmaster by reading the comments on a video about Taylor Swift and googling to do further reading.
In my TikTok feed, I’m seeing more and more Swifties make the argument that Swift could and should fight to break up Ticketmaster’s monopoly. This begs the question, though: will she do so if it means going against her own financial interests? Fans cite her crusade against streaming services in the mid-2010s as proof she will, but I fear that many are misremembering her changing stances during this time; this timeline from The Verge is useful.
I think that for a lot of fans, particularly those who didn’t get tickets, this mess will serve as the straw that broke the camel’s back; they could excuse the private jets, because that affects the planet in the long-term and not them directly and Swift needs them for security purposes; they could excuse the Midnights merch rollout with several vinyl variants despite it being an obvious cash grab because she was just giving collectors what they wanted; what they cannot excuse is not being able to see their favourite singer perform live after years of waiting to do so.
Based on what I’ve seen, I think the majority of fans are angry at Ticketmaster, and some are unwilling to direct any of that anger towards Swift, whose music means so much to them. It’s far easier to be mad at a corporation than it is to reckon with the fact that your favourite artist in the entire world potentially cares more about earning money than she does about her fans.
There is definitely an increasingly vocal contingent of Swifties, however, who are tired of Swift’s repeated attempts to get them to spend their money, particularly following a pandemic that saw millions of people lose their lives and their livelihoods. At this point, it’s a matter of watching and waiting to see which contingent Swift listens to, and ultimately, which she values more: her bank account or her reputation as an artist that genuinely cares about their fans.