Bots to blame for Taylor Swift ticket fiasco

The presale for Swift's first tour in five years saw historic demand, but it wasn't real fans who had rushed to buy tickets.

(FILES) In this file photo taken on September 09, 2022 US singer Taylor Swift attends "In Conversation With... Taylor Swift" during the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival at TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. - Taylor Swift made music history October 31, 2022, becoming the first artist ever to simultaneously nab all ten of the top US song chart's spots after the release of her album "Midnights." (Photo by VALERIE MACON / AFP)

The presale for the pop star’s first tour in five years saw historic demand, overwhelming ticketing systems and leaving few available seats.

Ticketmaster has blamed a "staggering number of bot attacks" for stopping Taylor Swift fans from buying tickets to her Eras Tour.

Bot attacks drove “unprecedented traffic” that caused website outages and long wait times during Tuesday’s ticket presale, the company said. Fans slathered the site in criticism for excessive wait times during the sale and Tennessee’s Attorney General is now investigating those complaints.

The company said only 15% of interactions across its site experienced issues.

The presale for Swift's first tour in five years saw historic demand on Tuesday, overwhelming ticketing systems and leaving few available seats. Swift’s 52-date stadium run sold over two million tickets in the presale - more than any other artist in a single day.

The presale was limited to a select group of people who had registered with Ticketmaster, part of an effort to ensure that actual fans, rather than scalpers, got first crack at tickets.

But on Thursday, Ticketmaster confirmed that the general sale would be called off. The ticket seller said the cancellation was due to high demand and “insufficient remaining ticket inventory to meet that demand.” 

The site was one of the few places people could buy a ticket for Swift’s tour. Ticketmaster said it received 3.5 billion system requests on its site - four times its previous peak.

Ticketmaster on Thursday said that even though the presale was only available to people who had been invited to participate, that didn’t prevent others, including bad actors, from attempting to get in. “The staggering number of bot attacks as well as fans who didn’t have invite codes drove unprecedented traffic on our site,” it said.

Resale sites like StuHub are now offering seats for an April show in Florida, ranging from $US338 ($500) to $US28,350 ($42,000) each.

Taylor Swift. Photo by Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic

Ticketmaster's 'anticompetitive behaviour'

Live Nation and Ticketmaster, two of the biggest forces in the music industry, merged in 2010 with approval from federal antitrust regulators. They sell a majority of tickets for live events, which some critics said has allowed Ticketmaster to drive up prices and tack on extra fees. Politicians have said Ticketmaster acts like a monopoly, leaving the company with little motivation to improve its technology. The site struggled to cope with demand this week from millions of Swift’s fans.

Politicians and Swift’s fans criticised Ticketmaster for anticompetitive behaviour this week.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, the chair of the Senate antitrust subcommittee, wrote a letter Wednesday to Live Nation Chief Executive Michael Rapino, saying she has serious concerns about the reports that Ticketmaster had been crashing and increasing fees.

“Ticketmaster’s power in the primary ticket market insulates it from the competitive pressures that typically push companies to innovate,” she said. “That can result in dramatic service failures, where consumers are the ones that pay the price,” she added.

Klobuchar, a Democrat, said Ticketmaster’s woes were an example of why the U.S. needs strong antitrust enforcement. She asked Mr. Rapino to address by next week whether the company had improved its technology and complied with federal antitrust requirements.

Politicians including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.), Rep. Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.), and White House chief of staff Ron Klain responded to the Ticketmaster situation this week.

“Daily reminder that Ticketmaster is a monopoly,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote in a tweet earlier this week. “Break them up.” In Tennessee, where Swift is set to perform three shows in May, Jonathan Skrmetti, the state’s attorney general, said he was concerned about complaints his office had received about the site’s ticket sale process.

“Any time you have that kind of concentration of market share,” he said, “there’s the risk that the lack of competition will not just drive up prices for consumers, it will also reduce the quality of the product.” Industry executives said Swift’s tour posed one of the ticketing industry’s biggest tests since pandemic-era restrictions had been lifted.

Ticketmaster was selling seats for Swift’s U.S. stadium tour from $49 to $449, with some VIP packages as high as $899. Dynamic pricing adjusts tickets based on demand, according to Ticketmaster, similar to how airlines tweak fares. The feature frustrated fans as it pushed prices higher.

The Verified Fan program, which Swift has used previously, encourages fans to register weeks before tickets go on sale and asks them to provide their name, email and phone number.

Ticketmaster doesn’t disclose the exact details of how its Verified Fan program works. According to people familiar with the program, the ticketing company mines its own sales records, along with publicly available data such as social-media history, to verify would-be buyers’ identities. Those deemed legitimate are sent codes that let them access tickets at a fan-only presale.

Some industry executives and government officials said Tuesday’s Verified Fan presale could have been run better. They -- and fans -- pointed out that Ticketmaster knew how many codes were sent to people who would be trying to purchase tickets at the same time.

When Swift used the Verified Fan program for her 2018 tour, there was less congestion on Ticketmaster because the U.S. tickets went on sale over several days.

Louis Messina, founder of the Messina Group, a joint venture with AEG Presents promoting Swift’s tour, pointed to the sheer demand as the driver of system hiccups during the sale. AEG Presents is the concert-promotion arm of closely held Anschutz Entertainment Group.

“Imagine 5,000 people trying to get in one car on the subway,” he said. Ticketmaster competitor SeatGeek was selling tickets for Swift’s shows in Arlington, Texas, and Glendale, Ariz. The company said fans on its site were also waiting a long time to secure a seat.

SeatGeek didn’t return a request for comment Thursday.

Fans who didn’t get seats during Ticketmaster’s presale could try to purchase third-party tickets. Those seats have already been marked up.

On StubHub, a ticket resale site, seats near Swift’s stage at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey were listed for as much as $76,000 Thursday morning.

With The Wall Street Journal