Ticketmaster stated it realized a “valuable lesson” from final yr’s Taylor Swift live performance sale fiasco, although it will not be sufficient to win over American politicians arguing the corporate has an excessive amount of management within the reside occasion market.
On Tuesday, a high govt from Ticketmaster’s guardian firm Live Nation Leisure appeared on the U.S. Senate to argue they don’t maintain a ticket sale monopoly. The corporate has additionally denied breaking any antitrust legal guidelines.
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In written testimony submitted previous to Tuesday’s trial, Reside Nation claimed that Ticketmaster’s Taylor Swift sale was focused by software program bots that illegally obtained tickets and snubbed keen followers. These bots had been then capable of flip and resell tickets purchased in bulk for astronomical costs.
In November 2022, a chaotic presale for Swift’s 2023 Eras stadium tour left 1000’s of followers with out admission. Although Ticketmaster required followers to register for the presale in an try to stop cyberattacks, followers skilled website crashes and hours-long on-line queue instances.
The corporate claimed that greater than 3.5 million people registered for the presale. In an announcement, Ticketmaster wrote it bought greater than two million tickets and fielded 3.5 billion system requests, which is 4 instances its earlier peak.
In consequence, Ticketmaster needed to cancel the deliberate normal ticket sale resulting from a scarcity of remaining stock.
After the botched sale, Swift said it was “excruciating for me to simply watch errors occur with no recourse.”
Taylor Swift posted an announcement to her Instagram account about Ticketmaster’s sale cancellation on Nov. 17, 2022.
Instagram / @taylorswift
“We apologize to the fans, we apologize to Ms. Swift, we need to do better and we will do better,” Reside Nation’s president and chief monetary officer, Joe Berchtold, stated in the course of the listening to on Tuesday.
“In hindsight, there are several things we could have done better, including staggering the sales over a longer period of time and doing a better job setting fan expectations for getting tickets.”
Ticketmaster merged with Reside Nation in 2010, reportedly leading to control of more than 70 per cent of the first ticketing and reside occasion venues market.
Berchtold requested lawmakers to concentrate on creating laws to do with ticket scalping and different fraudulent practices, like third-party listings for tickets which have but to go on sale.

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Live Nation said in November that the rationale it holds a dominant function within the market is “the large gap that exists between the quality of the Ticketmaster system and the next best primary ticketing system.”
Jack Groetzinger, co-founder of ticket gross sales platform SeatGeek, stated in the course of the Senate listening to Tuesday that current ticket sale strategies are “antiquated and ripe for innovation.”
“As long as Live Nation remains both the dominant concert promoter and ticketer of major venues in the U.S., the industry will continue to lack competition and struggle,” he advised lawmakers.
— With recordsdata from Reuters
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