Demand for Taylor Swift tickets rattles Ticketmaster

The Future. Ticketmaster’s sale of Taylor Swift’s “The Eras Tour” may go down as one of the most chaotic offerings in music history, with demand far exceeding any tour in the company’s history. The dust is still settling on how Ticketmaster will handle the remaining tickets (if there are any), but one thing may be certain — Taylor Swift is the biggest act in the world right now, bar none.

Too big to succeed
Ticketmaster learned this week that there is such a thing as too much of a good thing, according to Insider.

• Ticketmaster leveraged its “Verified Fan” program to sell Taylor Swift tickets — a record 3.5 million people signed up.
• So when the sale started, 1.5 million people were immediately let in while the other 2 million were put on a waiting list.
• The trouble is that 14 million people (and bots) showed up to buy tickets, forcing millions of fans to wait hours to get a shot at getting a ticket.
• Ticketmaster’s site couldn’t handle that kind of traffic. Live Nation chairman Greg Maffei said the tour resulted in “3.5 billion total system requests — 4x our previous peak.”

To fulfill all the demand, Maffei said Swift would need to perform over 900 stadium shows (almost 20x the number of shows she is doing)… that’s a stadium show every single night for the next 2.5 years.”

Ultimately, two million tickets were sold that day.

Stadium-sized stakes
Some lawmakers and government officials want to pull the plug on Ticketmaster’s dominance in the live-music industry.

• Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Senator David Cicilline (D-RI), and others have either criticized Live Nation’s dominance or called for its breakup over antitrust concerns.
• Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti announced that he’s perform over 900 stadium shows in relation to Live Nation’s market share.

And with the actual public sale of Swift tickets that were supposed to take place today being scrapped because of “extraordinarily high demands on ticketing systems” and “insufficient remaining ticket inventory,” don’t expect the volume on this to go down anytime soon.