Taylor Swift announced her first tour in 4 years, after releasing 5 albums within the span of these 4 years. This tour, called the Eras tour, is her first tour to focus on all of the “eras” of her music. Swift has an incredibly loyal fan base, and especially with a tour that focuses on multiple new and old albums, old and new fans are intrigued, creating a huge demand for concert tickets.
Many artists, including Adele and Pheobe Bridgers, have allowed Ticketmaster to sell tickets on their behalf, using a “Verified Fan” algorithm to make tickets more accessibly for fans instead of bots who buy tickets and resell them for triple the price. But, Ticketmaster was not expecting the ginormous amount of people who tried to buy tickets; Ticketmaster said it received around 3.5 billion system requests on the site. This huge demand crashed Ticketmaster’s system, creating virtual queues that lasted hours, with hopefully buyers getting kicked out of the system and receive error messages.
Ticketmaster and Live Nation, two of the biggest forces in concert ticket sales, merged in 2010. This has allowed Ticketmaster to act like a monopoly, creating little motivation for the company to improve technology that would stop incidents like this from happening again. Ticketmaster hasn’t formally apologized for this event, and they have done little to help those who weren’t able to get tickets.
More information pertaining to this topic can be found in this Wall Street Journal article written by Anne Steele and Alyssa Lukpat:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/ticketmaster-backlash-mounts-after-taylor-swift-ticket-debacle-11668699888?mod=article_inline