Beyoncé’s Renaissance tour will test Ticketmaster

The Future. Tickets for Beyoncé’s Renaissance tour go on sale over the next few days, and their rollout will be Ticketmaster’s biggest test since demand for tickets to Taylor Swift’s Eras tour shut the platform down in November. Averting disaster this time around might help Ticketmaster’s parent company, Live Nation Entertainment, avert the regulatory crackdown that looms in their future.

Too-popular demand
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Ticketmaster is preparing for an onslaught of ticket requests for the Renaissance tour.

• The Renaissance tour is Beyoncé’s first solo tour in over six years, so demand is expected to far outpace supply.

• That’s an issue because overwhelming demand is what crashed Ticketmaster during the release of tickets for the Eras tour, when the site received three times more bot requests than it ever had before.

• This time, Ticketmaster is staggering ticket sale dates by city to reduce the risk of huge spikes in site traffic at any given point in time. Still, the site expects demand to exceed available tickets and will distribute them according to a lottery process.

Tickets for the North American leg of the tour go on sale February 6th.

In the spotlight
Handling this well won’t protect Live Nation from allegations of abusing their monopolistic position, and the company is likely to face federal regulation either way. But public opinion influences policy decisions, and pulling off Renaissance sales would go a long way towards convincing the public that the company can handle the market on their own, regardless of whether they should.