Taylor Swift may very well be the most powerful antitrust regulator in America at the moment.
I was on a roadtrip through Southern California when the Taylor Swift Eras tour presale happened Tuesday, November 15th, and though I had a full tank of gas and a wide-open schedule to do whatever I wanted in LA for the day, I spent two hours of my morning sitting in a Starbucks watching Taylorgate play out on Twitter. I wasn't even trying to buy tickets myself, but the whole episode was just too enthralling and indicative of how toothless our antitrust regulators have become to stop watching it. And much like every 23-year-old girl across the nation, those Taylor tickets were top-of-mind for me for at least the next week. It's taken me until now to fully get to a point where I feel I can write about it in a post-mortem type of way rather than a heat-of-the-moment way.
Let's start with one-positive note before the mood nosedives considerably. I think in general Ticketmaster's Verified Fan program is a great initiative to make sure more tickets end up in the hands of card-carrying fans, and the fact that according to Ticketmaster less than 5% of tickets from the Taylor presale were listed on the secondary market is a big win. So kudos to Ticketmaster there.
Alright. On to the dirty stuff.
Let's start with Ticketmaster's handling of the fallout, which is probably the element most annoying to me at this point. Ticketmaster published this apology and explanation piece a few days after the presale shedding light on what happened in an attempt to convince the world, "Alas, this situation was out of our hands, and there was nothing we could have done to improve it." A lot of Taylor fans were sharing stats and screenshots from it with the sentiment of, "Wow, our queen literally broke the internet." But somehow reading this apology made me only more pissed off at Ticketmaster. So many things about it just feel off to me.
First, I simply refuse to feel any sympathy for Ticketmaster having to deal with "3.5 billion total system requests – 4x our previous peak." Fans only had to submit that many requests to the website because the website completely crashed. You can't blame your incompetence on obscenely high web traffic when your incompetence literally caused the obscenely high web traffic. It's sort of like that deeply ironic feeling you get when politicians demonize the opposing party for an entire election cycle and then complain after they get elected that the government is too polarized to get anything done. You don't get a right to complain about a problem when you caused the problem.
Then there is Ticketmaster's statement of, "...we estimate about 15% of interactions across the site experienced issues." Complete BS. 15% of fans experienced catastrophic system failures like "passcode validation errors that caused fans to lose tickets they had carted." The other 85% sat in a queue for 6 hours to complete the 60 second process of buying online concert tickets, and it's utterly ridiculous to me that Ticketmaster would not classify those as an "issue." If you waited in-line at Starbucks six hours for your coffee, they wouldn't consider it a successful customer interaction in the seventh hours when they finally serve you your coffee. There's no reason Ticketmaster should treat themselves any differently.
Then there's the hilariously misguided forecasts of, "Historically, around 40% of invited fans actually show up and buy tickets, and most purchase an average of 3 tickets." This seems like a classic case of data blindness. Sure, this might be what the data says based on past pre-sales, but did you actually talk to any Taylor Swift fans, Ticketmaster? Did you ask how many were planning on logging on to buy tickets? Because I can guarantee you far more than 40% of the people I know who registered for the presale were trying to buy tickets. Ticketmaster writes all over this piece about how "we knew this would be big," so why did they forecast as if it was average?
Then there's the casual mention of the "staggering number of bot attacks" the company had to thwart. First off, if there were a "staggering number of bot attacks," then give me a number. There are stats all over this apology piece but not a single number about how many bot attacks there were or what percent of traffic was from bots, and until I know what that number is, I have to assume it was a number small enough that the PR team didn't want to include it here. But let's give them the benefit of the doubt. Let's say there actually were a "staggering number of bot attacks." Why were these bots able to access the purchasing page in the first place? Why was the general public able to access the purchasing page? Why did Ticketmaster design their site in a way that allowed anyone on the planet to access the purchasing page rather than just the 1.5 million verified fans?
And last but not least, how is it physically possible to sell so many presale tickets that you have to cancel the public on-sale? It's not only unfair to the 2 million fans who weren't selected for the presale, but it's just downright unfathomable how this was allowed to happen. Ticketmaster probably set aside ~80% of tickets for the presale, but they just accidentally sold 100%? What's the explanation here?
There are a bunch of clear opportunities for Ticketmaster to improve this process. As I mentioned above, there is no reason that the purchasing pages for verified pre-sales should be publicly accessible links. These links should be designed to only accept traffic from verified fans, and this verification should be done before the on-sale time to limit all this excess verification processing on the servers. These massive ticket on-sales also need to be spaced out better. These pre-sale windows should never have been simultaneous. They should be spaced out with hours or days between each city. Supposedly it was Taylor's team who specifically requested all the tickets for a region go on-sale at the same time, probably so they could get some cool PR moment about selling the most tickets ever in a single hour or day or something. But Ticketmaster was surely the one who confirmed to Taylor's team that they could support this sort of traffic, and clearly they were wrong. Lesson learned: these server-buckling mass on-sale times should be avoided going forward.
But really it's not my job to fix this. It's Ticketmaster's. Selling tickets is what they're paid to be good at, and this time they weren't very good at it. But when you're an unregulated monopoly in an industry, you don't have to be good at what you do. You just can't piss people off too much. That's why Ticketmaster's apology had the tone that it did. They weren't saying, "We hear your concerns, and we hold ourselves entirely accountable, and here is our plan to do better." They said, "We're sorry you had a crap afternoon buying tickets, but read these numbers and you'll see it wasn't our fault." Once again, when you're an unregulated monopoly, all you have to do is not piss people off too much. This piece from Ticketmaster was appeasement, not an apology.
But this might be the sort of issue where DC is actually compelled to act. It's really hard for antitrust regulators to crackdown on Google or Apple or Amazon because in general consumers (and therefore voters) love those companies and services. Amazon might be edging close to an e-commerce monopoly, but if it gets me two-day shipping on Tide laundry detergent, I'm almost okay with that. I don't want Amy Klobuchar changing that. But Ticketmaster is an enemy everyone can agree upon, and partnering with Taylor Swift on this issue would give any politicians involved some cultural credibility. It seems like the perfect case for regulators to finally show their teeth and clamp down. I won't be holding my breath, but Swifties vote too, and maybe, just maybe, Taylor has the sway and the following to spur Congress into action. A fan can only hope.
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