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What's Happening With the Concerns Over How Event Tickets Are Sold Online?
The November 2022 tech meltdown of online access that slowed or barred consumers from buying tickets from Ticketmaster for Taylor Swift's Eras Tour, her first since 2018 and the largest one-day ticket demand Ticketmaster had ever faced, generated worldwide coverage and outrage from her fans. But the incident also resulted in a sizzling convergence of many of the issues that have plagued online sales of live events for years.
These include, among others: attacks on primary ticket sellers' websites by bots that enable ticket resellers to scoop up blocks of tickets at face value in order to sell them on the secondary market for much higher prices (though Ticketmaster claims it was able to block bots from Swift primary-ticket harvesting); a lack of transparency as to the fees (some mandated by concert venues) that ticket sellers "drip price" to ticket purchasers between the time a consumer enters an online que but sees the full price only at check out; and long-running antitrust concerns over Ticketmaster's control of a large piece of the ticket-sales market while it remains merged with the events industry's dominant concert promoter Live Nation.
On that last point, when the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) approved the merger of Live Nation and Ticketmaster back in 2010, it put into place a consent decree effective to 2020 meant to restrict the monolithic company from cross leveraging its oversized clout in concert promotion and ticket sales into requiring venue owners to book Live Nation shows and enter into exclusive contracts to utilize Ticketmaster.
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