Swift Justice – WSJ

Ms. Swift is one of the few live concert acts who can fill a National Football League stadium. As recent events have shown, she is one of the even more rare stars who can add a second or third night at such venues, sell those out, too, and not seem to satiate the demand of her young fans. She seems to be playing in a league of her own.

The Journal’s Anne Steele and Alyssa Lukpat report:

Taylor Swift has responded to the Ticketmaster debacle that blocked many of her fans this week from getting tickets to her tour, saying Friday that it was “excruciating for me to just watch mistakes happen with no recourse.”

Millions of fans swarmed Live Nation Entertainment Inc.’s Ticketmaster site Tuesday, causing it to crash. Many trying to get presale tickets for the “Eras Tour” didn’t get them or had to wait for hours.

The Justice Department is investigating Live Nation over whether the company has violated antitrust laws, according to people familiar with the matter. Live Nation, in a statement late Friday, said it didn’t engage in behavior that warranted litigation or an order to change its business practices.

The New York Times

earlier reported the investigation, which predates this week’s outcry over glitches during Ms. Swift’s presales.

Ms. Swift, who didn’t publicly address the situation until Friday, in her comments appeared to blame Ticketmaster without naming the company directly.

“It’s really difficult for me to trust an outside entity with these relationships and loyalties,” she wrote on Instagram.

Ms. Swift’s concern for her fans seems genuine. Her family is known in the event management industry for taking more than the usual level of care to try to create a safe environment for the kids who attend her shows. But when it comes to the infrastructure of ticketing, it’s not necessarily practical to build her own.

Dave Brooks at Billboard reports on the options for Ms. Swift and her concert promoters if they want to stage shows in the biggest and best venues:

In North America, that means working with Ticketmaster, which is especially dominant in the NFL as it provides tickets to 27 of the NFL’s 32 teams. By choosing to stage her show in NFL stadiums – really, in choosing to tour stadiums in the U.S. — Swift and her partners at AEG and Messina Touring Group are effectively forced to use Ticketmaster due to its supremacy in North America.

But Mr. Brooks adds:

… it would also be inaccurate to describe Swift or AEG’s relationship with Ticketmaster as one built upon coercion. Historically, it’s been more mutually beneficial…

Swift has worked very closely with Ticketmaster over the years — for her Reputation stadium tour, the COVID-19-canceled Lovers Fest and now the Eras Tour, building an entire fan verification and Taylor Swift-branded ticketing platform together. While Swift might have preferred to have had more options to sell tickets to her fans, she did partner with the company in a way that few artists have in the past.

Perhaps Ticketmaster and Swift will mend their relationship once they start counting how much money they made together. Or maybe, they’re never, ever, ever, ever getting back together.

If Ms. Swift decides to shake off her relationship with Ticketmaster, SeatGeek appears to be the most technologically formidable competitor. And if she wants to avoid the NFL buildings that have agreements with Ticketmaster, she could likely assemble enough college football or baseball stadiums to stage a big national tour, but she might not be bringing her fans to the places they would most enjoy.

And whoever handles the ticketing, there’s still the big question of how to keep all the Swifties happy–there are just so many of these enthusiastic fans. Some politicians and members of the press may focus on non-fans who bought tickets for the purpose of reselling at a profit. Whether the item being traded is a share of stock or a Taylor Swift ticket, this column likes secondary markets and finds they carry great consumer benefits. But in any case, they may be a relatively small part of this story.

Ticketmaster says:

Over 2 million tickets were sold on Ticketmaster for Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour on Nov. 15 – the most tickets ever sold for an artist in a single day… Less than 5% of the tickets for the tour have been sold or posted for resale on the secondary market…

Ticketmaster’s explanation also suggests that simply adding more tour dates cannot solve the underlying problem, at least not without driving Ms. Swift to exhaustion:

Even when a high demand onsale goes flawlessly from a tech perspective, many fans are left empty handed. For example: based on the volume of traffic to our site, Taylor would need to perform over 900 stadium shows (almost 20x the number of shows she is doing)…that’s a stadium show every single night for the next 2.5 years. While it’s impossible for everyone to get tickets to these shows, we know we can do more to improve the experience and that’s what we’re focused on.

If Ms. Swift doesn’t want to engage in demand destruction by elevating prices and if her overriding goal is to let every fan see a live show, she could initiate a sort of quantitative easing by flooding the market with live appearances at places like Central Park, the National Mall and the Indianapolis Motor Speedway that can accommodate hundreds of thousands of fans. But it seems unreasonable to ask her to work nonstop to devalue her concert tickets.

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James Freeman is the co-author of “The Cost: Trump, China and American Revival.”

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Follow James Freeman on Twitter.

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(Teresa Vozzo helps compile Best of the Web. Thanks to Linda Quarles.)