“Taylor Swift Broke Ticketmaster!”
That was the gist of the headlines two years ago, when Swift's Eras tour resulted in a ticket sales fiasco of epic proportions. Hordes of Swifties were spooked by a) their inability to get an expensive ticket plus fees to the Tour of the Century or b) their inability to even log on to the Ticketmaster website amid overwhelming demand.
But then many abandoned Swifties, or their parents, got resale tickets for many times the face value from third parties who may have been using ticket-buying robots. And the world kept turning, as it had despite similar frustrations in recent years from fans of Beyoncé, Adele and Bruce Springsteen.
A group of TSwift fans filed a class-action lawsuit against Ticketmaster over its handling of the Eras Tour when a planned public ticket sale was canceled due to what the ticketing agency described as “extraordinarily high demands on ticketing systems.” “, which resulted in “insufficiency.” remaining ticket inventory to meet that demand.”
(“It's really amazing that 2.4 million people got tickets,” Swift wrote in a November 2022 statement on social media, “but it really pisses me off that so many of them feel like they went through several bear attacks to get them. “).
And now, the US Department of Justice, 29 states and the District of Columbia are riding a Beyoncé-level white horse, filing an antitrust lawsuit against Live Nation Entertainment, parent of Ticketmaster.
But haven't we been here before?
Taylor Swift had no problem filling SoFi Stadium's 70,000 seats for six shows in August 2023. However, the thousands of fans in attendance had some challenges getting tickets.
(Emma McIntyre/TAS23/Getty Images for TAS Rights Management)
In May 1994, Pearl Jam, then the biggest music group, filed a complaint with the Department of Justice alleging that Ticketmaster had an effective monopoly over ticket distribution in the United States and had influenced promoters to reject a tour. low price that the band planned to make. release that summer. Pearl Jam's complaint triggered a Department of Justice investigation into the company and its potential anti-competitive ticket sales practices.
But after a year-long investigation, Justice declined to bring a case against Ticketmaster.
“From day one we have correctly maintained that Pearl Jam had the ability to tour on its own. But the band, which has accused us of everything except breaking up the Beatles, seemed more interested in perpetuating the dispute than in scheduling concert dates,” Alan Citron, then a senior vice president at Ticketmaster, wrote in The Times in April 1995. He noted that after a year of public drama, Pearl Jam had gotten a discount on ticket handling for its fans that was “less than the price of this newspaper,” which at the time was 50 cents.
Citron noted that Costa Mesa's ETM Entertainment Network, the new company Pearl Jam had chosen for its tour, “has no experience handling such a large event and its automated technology is unproven.” He cited the band's manager's concerns about possible “setbacks.”
“If Pearl Jam had worked with us,” he wrote, “their fans could have seen the band a year ago for essentially the same price they are paying now, and the industry would have been spared this protracted and pointless battle.”
Eddie Vedder, performing at Bonnaroo in Tennessee in 2008, was a figurehead in the fight against Ticketmaster in the 1990s.
(Mark Humphrey/Associated Press)
On June 5, 1995, after a partial tour of non-Ticketmaster venues that included more than a few canceled shows, Pearl Jam called off their boycott. “I hate to think it's the wave of the future: corporate giants that can't be toppled,” frontman Eddie Vedder told a Chicago audience days later.
Pearl Jam would later explain why their Vitalogy tour failed. Without the support of Ticketmaster, the band members had to figure out all the details of the tour themselves while going to out-of-the-way venues that were not used to hosting rock concerts. That was probably one of the main reasons the band wasn't joined by other high-profile acts in their boycott.
“We wanted to make it clear how difficult it is to tour without Ticketmaster, and we did. I think you'll find that the band will do whatever it takes to play,” manager Kelly Curtis said in June, after the band canceled its only shows at Del Mar in Southern California over safety concerns from local authorities. “And if that means they're going to have to play some Ticketmaster shows, they're going to play Ticketmaster shows.”
Five years after Pearl Jam defected, ETM declared itself cashless and turned its business (including ticket sales to the San Diego Sports Arena, a portion of LA Dodgers seats, and several other teams and events) over to Ticketmaster.
A few years later, a young woman from Pennsylvania with a gift for songwriting would move with her family to Nashville and open the door to a whole new era of fame and fandom. The rest, as they say, is history.
In 2007, when she was just 17 years old, Taylor Swift performed at the 42nd Annual Academy of Country Music Awards in Las Vegas.
(Mark J. Terrill/Associated Press)
“I can say with great confidence that technologically Ticketmaster is a much better ticketing system today than it was in 2010,” Joe Berchtold, president and chief financial officer of Live Nation Entertainment, said during a Swiftie-driven Senate hearing on ticketing practices. Ticketmaster held in January 2023. “Its top-selling performance is the best in the industry, it has the best marketing capabilities of any ticketing system, and it is by far the leader in fraud prevention and making tickets get into the hands of real fans. “
At the time, Ticketmaster, with its 6,500 employees worldwide (compared to parent company Live Nation Entertainment's 44,000), controlled nearly 80% of the ticket market in the United States. It has been the most lucrative piece of the Live Nation conglomerate, which includes concert promotion and sponsorship management. Live Nation controls more than 265 concert venues in North America and manages more than 400 music artists, according to the Department of Justice.
Meanwhile, in April 2023, Pearl Jam announced that their upcoming tour would include “reasonably priced” tickets that would be challenging for fans to make a profit by selling to third-party vendors. It also promised “full pricing,” so fans won't be surprised with additional fees at checkout.
The band sold those non-transferable tickets through the Verified Fan program, administered by Ticketmaster.
Times staff writers Christi Carras and August Brown contributed to this report.
