Inside the Great Ticketmaster Taylor Swift Meltdown of 2022

Where were you during the Great Ticketmaster Taylor Swift Meltdown of 2022? On November 15, Ticketmaster’s site crashed. Badly. Repeatedly.?That's because Ticketmaster could not handle the onslaught of fans trying to buy tickets for Taylor Swift’s 2023 Eras tour.?

There was great gnashing of teeth among Taylor Swift’s fans, known Swifties, as they were locked out pre-sales scheduled for the day. Tears were shed. Laptops were surely slammed shut furiously, and even a few were probably kicked across the room. And, by God, the Swifties vented on Twitter with some of the most hilarious corporate trolling I’ve ever seen, such as these:

I can relate to all that. I, for one, sat in front of my laptop for hours like a sucker feeding coins into a slot machine -- except in this case, I wasted time, not money. I will say I had one of my most productive work days of the month as I sat beside a perpetually frozen Ticketmaster screen hoping for an opportunity to buy tickets for one of three shows scheduled in Chicago next June. (I also attended to a problem with our furnace that needed fixing. So there is a silver lining here: when you are chained to your laptop at home waiting in an interminable queue, you notice things. So, thank you Ticketmaster.) What else was there to do while my life was put on hold? During the multiple crashes, I did check out secondary ticket sites to amuse myself and fantasize about actually snatching up field-level seats (not a chance). Indeed, some lucky ticket buyers were quickly reselling their tickets on the secondary market, surely capitalizing on the growing panic as would-be ticketholders were denied by Ticketmaster. I saw two tickets on StubHub on sale for as high as $65,000. Yup. You read that right.?It was fun to pretend that those seats could be mine.

Eventually Ticketmaster got its fan presales back on track after hours of agonizing delays and blowback from news media (here is just one example). The company also rescheculed one of its presales to ease demand. But not before incurring the wrath of none other than legislator Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who tweeted, “Daily reminder that Ticketmaster is a monopoly, it’s merger with LiveNation should never have been approved, and they need to be reigned in. Break them up.”

That’s an ominous message at a time when President Joe Biden has already stated that the White House is taking on excessive fees charged by businesses such as Ticketmaster.?

The day after the wreckage, we’re left wondering why Ticketmaster melted down yet again in the face of predictable demand. The Eras was one of the most highly anticipated tours of this young decade – arguably of the 21st?Century. Everyone knew demand would be off-the-charts strong. Everyone but Ticketmaster.

Frankly, I was not surprised by the meltdown. It is not the first time I have personally had an exasperating experience on Ticketmaster. Most recently, I endured multiple site crashes when I tried to buy tickets for a Harry Styles concert. Same experience: long waits in a queue and then a dysfunctional purchasing process. (I ended up buying Harry Styles tickets on StubHub. Fortunately he had scheduled so many concerts in Chicago that tickets were more plentiful and reasonably priced on the secondary market. And no I did not pay $65,000 per ticket.)

The Taylor Swift fiasco was one more black eye for one of the most despised brands in America, notorious for exploitative pricing practices and terrible customer service. Whether Ticketmaster actually makes any improvements as a result of this remains to be seen. Meanwhile, I think there are a few lessons to be learned:

• We are eager to shed our lives spent in isolation and lockdown caused by the pandemic. The entire touring industry was shut down in 2020 and 2021. Pent-up demand for the human experience has been unleashed with power. And this is good. People are not ready to trade in the joy of live music for the impersonality of a digital concert.??
• Twitter reminded us of the power of social. The anger erupting across the Twitterverse was the first and most prominent sign that something was going wrong and that Ticketmaster needed to respond. And the company did take action, but not until after fans unleashed their fury. Twitter acted as a white-hot social listening platform.
• Brands are fragile. Ever get angry at Netflix when you experience a service interruption only to discover the problem wasn’t Netflix but your Internet provider? That’s the problem when brands are interconnected: when one brand has a lapse, everyone suffers. In this case, Ticketmaster has a chokehold on the music industry. Musicians, even the mighty Taylor Swift, have to bend to Ticketmaster’s will. As a result, when Ticketmaster suffers an outage, Taylor Swift risks reputation damage and lost income, too. Of course, she is going to be fine. She is operating at another level of superstardom. But what about lesser known performers who are trying to break through during a bruising touring season marked by inflationary operational costs? I worry about them.

I don’t think there are any lessons to be learned about Ticketmaster itself. The company has been down this path before. Maybe invest those excessive ticketing fees into a better website?