Hating on Ticketmaster has become an American pastime equivalent to Sunday afternoon baseball and apple pie. Every time a major concert tour rolls around, we sign up for our presale codes, we log on to Ticketmaster ten minutes before the on-sale time, and then we act flabbergasted afterwards when nothing about the experience goes well. The long queue times. The egregious fees. The outrageously priced tickets. The mini heart attack when you finally get into the purchasing window and know you have approximately two seconds to add tickets to your cart before they are all gone. Those sorts of things. Pissing off valuable customers is Ticketmaster's core competency.
And in the wake of the Taylor Swift Eras Tour debacle, the number of card carrying Ticketmaster Defamation League members in the US has skyrocketed. Everyone always hated Ticketmaster, but now everyone really hates Ticketmaster.
But here's a novel idea: we shouldn't hate Ticketmaster. Ticketmaster isn't doing anything we shouldn't have expected.
Do you remember Travis the Chimp? That pet chimpanzee who made national news maybe 10 or 15 years ago when he attacked his Connecticut owner's friend and practically tore her face off? It was an incredibly scary accident to hear about and I don't mean to diminish the tragedy there, but I think many people reacted to it the same way I did: "Well what did you expect? It's a chimpanzee." Few people were really blaming the monkey for the tragedy because the monkey was just being a monkey.
That's sort of how I feel about Ticketmaster. Ticketmaster is being extremely anticompetitive and extorting their ticket buyers for higher prices and fees and making it nearly impossible for the biggest stars to avoid its network of live venues, but what did you expect? It's a business. If nobody was going to stop it from merging with Live Nation to form a functional monopoly on the US ticket industry and using variable pricing to get top-dollar out of its ticket inventory and charging fees that close to double the real purchase price of the ticket in some instances, then of course it was going to do those things. The business is just being a business. We shouldn't necessarily blame Ticketmaster for making ticket buying so hellish; we need to point the finger at Congress for still allowing this BS to perpetuate.
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