Today, Explained - Ticketmaster (Taylor’s Version)

Episode Date: November 21, 2022

It’s me, Ticketmaster. I’m the problem, it’s me. This episode was produced by Amanda Lewellyn, edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Paul Robert Mounsey, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. This episode features a fun Taylor Swift parody courtesy of Miranda Hardy and Liz Larkin on TikTok @MirandaHardyMusic. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained   Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Are you ready for it? Taylor Swift's fans were, but Ticketmaster wasn't. Ticketmaster announcing that it is now canceling the general public ticket sale for Taylor Swift's first tour in five years after a chaotic and glitch-filled pre-sale event. Uh, it was canceled. That's so interesting. That means it's never gonna happen again. That's what canceled means.

The great war has begun between Taylor Swift fans and Ticketmaster. Why is Ticketmaster still in business? Why? It's like the situation was already bad and it just keeps getting worse. You have one job, it's to sell tickets. Why are you so bad at it? If I were this bad at my job, I would have been fired. Swifties still haven't forgiven Jake Gyllenhaal. What will they do to live music's biggest monopoly? That's coming up on Today Explained. You don't even need a ticket.

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Visit connectsontario.ca. What would happen if you just called Taylor up and just say, what just, you know, what happened? How did this go so south? Today Explained featuring Jason Kebler, who's here to tell us how Swifties might finally take down Ticketmaster. Jason's the editor-in-chief of the motherboard section at Vice, but long before that, he used to be a scalper. I kind of fell into it accidentally. I had tickets to see Linkin Park in high school. And at the time I was sort of obsessed with eBay, so I just put them on eBay and they got bid up to, you know, $100 over what I paid. And I was like, wow, like I can use this to go see some movies or something, hang out with my friends.

And so after that, I was like, oh, I wonder if I could do this on purpose. I started sort of diving into the world of ticket scalping. Like there are all these secret forums that you pay for access to. And on these forums, people share tips and tricks for how to get tickets, how to access presale passwords. There's like all this software that you can use to detect things like ticket drops, which are when a show looks like it's sold out, but then later Ticketmaster releases extra tickets. You'll get like an alert saying, hey, go buy these right now. I made a decent amount of money for a little while, and then I got really disorganized. And I started buying tickets to shows I shouldn't have and ended up in a lot of credit card debt that took me five years to pay off. So but that doesn't mean that people who are good at it don't make a lot. So does your familiarity with the Ticketmaster ecosystem

mean that you were less surprised last week to see Swifties around the country and the world throw a fit over their inability to get tickets to see their favorite artist? I knew this would happen. I knew you were trouble when you walked in. Like, I was I knew this would happen. I knew you were trouble when you walked in. Like I was positive that this would happen. Trouble, trouble, trouble.

It's like Taylor Swift is, in my opinion, the biggest, like the hottest ticket that I can imagine at this point. And historically, that's been the case too. It's always been really hard to get Taylor Swift tickets for every tour she's ever done. Take a look at the crowd at the Staples Center in Los Angeles, where Taylor Swift sold out four shows within minutes. Well, good evening, Los Angeles!

It's almost like a ritual at this point. It's like big band or big artist announces a major tour, tickets go on sale, Ticketmaster either crashes or everything sells out instantly and everyone is freely mad. And then I come in and explain what happens because I've now seen this for a decade. And it's the same story every time. For all the non-Swifties out there, could you help us understand what happened last week

with this particular tour? Taylor Swift announces the Heiress tour. It's the news that Swifties have been waiting for Taylor Swift announcing this morning that she's going on tour. It is on the back of her newest album, which everyone really likes, seemingly. And basically they announce a series of pre-sales and then a public on sale. If you're going to try to get tickets during Taylor Swift pre-sale but have no idea what you're doing, this video is for you. So if your internet works a little faster on your phone, maybe use your phone.

If it works a lot better on your laptop, do that. Once you do that, you'll get a message like this in your inbox just telling you that you have successfully registered for pre-sale. So this means that you've bought Taylor Swift tickets in the past. It means that you have successfully registered for pre-sale. So this means that you've bought Taylor Swift tickets in the past. It means that you're part of her fan club. It means that you pre-registered and won a lottery. So you get a special password that allows you to buy tickets early. If you got selected, you'll get a message like this and basically it'll have your access code as well as a link to the pre-sale. If you don't get tickets, it's okay. Take a breath.

You'll still have a chance on Friday when they go on sale to the general public. Have fun. I'm so excited. They do the pre-sales, and even by limiting these pre-sales to, you know, Capital One credit card holders, Ticketmaster's site crashes. Because it seems to me

This thing is breaking down The great war has begun between Taylor Swift fans and Ticketmaster. Unprecedented demand for the musician's first tour in five years was off the charts, and Ticketmaster's servers weren't ready for it. Millions of people hit Ticketmaster's site at the same time. There are 2,000 plus people in front of me in line. And a friend of mine who is also waiting in line also has 2000 plus people in front of her. So we didn't get good places in the queue. Hi, friends and smifties. Yet another update. I am

so comfortable with my 2000 plus place in line that I'm walking around my house now. I had a snack. It's going great. Just kidding. They sell, I heard, 2 million tickets across the country. So tons and tons of people do get tickets. I got them. I got the Taylor Swift tickets. I'm paid $126 to be in the section 500. But the truth is, is that I would have paid anything to not be in that queue anymore. Places that are easier to get into than Taylor Swift's Aris Tour. Harvard, the Illuminati, Area 51.

And there was supposed to be this public on sale where basically the plebs can go by the people who don't have you know a pre-sale password or this special access can go buy tickets and so lots of taylor swift fans are waiting for this public on sale and last week the day before the public on sale, which was supposed to be Friday, Ticketmaster announces there's not going to be a public on sale. Ticketmaster canceled the public sale on Thursday, citing extraordinary high demand on ticketing systems and insufficient remaining ticket inventory. People go apoplectic.

They are so mad because essentially they feel like they didn't ever have a shot at buying these tickets. Basically, if you didn't get a code, you didn't even get a chance to buy tickets. The thing is, is if you have no tickets, how are you the ticket master? So there's no way that you don't have any tickets left, in my opinion. Why were tickets so hard to get for this particular tour? which is seats in a specific venue for a specific time and day to see a human being play a concert. There are millions and millions of Taylor Swift fans. And there are just, you know, 50,000 or 80,000 seats in a football stadium. Don't blame me, love made me crazy.

If it doesn't, you ain't doing it right. I wouldn't blame Taylor Swift for this debacle. I think Taylor has done as much as is humanly possible and continues to do what she can to make sure that the most number of people can see her shows. I think one thing that I should point out is she's playing exclusively in football stadiums, which are the biggest venues that exist

in North America, more or less like by and large football stadiums are the largest venues. Many of them hold 80 90,000 people. And she's playing multiple dates in each city. And she's added shows, which is basically all she can do. She can do her part to sort of increase supply of tickets. And the way that she does that is she just can just keep adding shows until demand comes down. The question is, like, what is the ceiling on demand for Taylor Swift? We certainly haven't found it yet. And there's also seemingly not much of a ceiling on prices.

These tickets were going out from Ticketmaster at prices that were shocking people across the internet, right? Why was that? Yeah, Ticketmaster has rolled out this system called dynamic pricing over the last few years, which uses an algorithm to predict the demand for any given ticket. It takes historical data for specific artists and specific venues and similar artists and so on and so forth, and essentially attempts to predict the

highest price that people are going to be willing to pay that will still sell out the show. And that really upsets people, although it is successful in sort of stopping ticket scalpers because the higher our prices at the outset, the less margin that a ticket scalper is gonna be able to make on the sale of that ticket and the more risk that they're taking on by paying more upfront. It seems like dynamic pricing was not used for this Taylor Swift tour.

I mean, don't get me wrong, the tickets are really expensive. It's like floor seats are $300, but it seems like they are set at that price versus like one person will pay $300 for a floor seat and another person will pay $900 for a floor seat. Taylor Swift is apologizing to her fans for the disaster. She posted her frustrations on Instagram today saying, I'm not going to make excuses for anyone because we asked them multiple times if they could handle this kind of demand.

And we were assured they could. What does Ticketmaster have to say for how this all went down. Ticketmaster's line, and this has been their line for a long time, is that there are more people who want to buy tickets than tickets that exist. Sorry. It's just like unprecedented demand, limited resource. Sorry.

That's pretty much all they've ever had to say. Taylor Swift might be the one artist with enough cachet and power and fans to actually change this. Could she? I think that Taylor Swift, if she wants to, can bring a huge magnifying glass to the issue that Ticketmaster is a monopoly. In the past, bands like Pearl Jam and Bruce Springsteen have called out Ticketmaster for its ticketing practices. Pearl Jam played Capitol Hill on Thursday, as guitarist Stone Gossard and bassist Jeff Amitt

were at the House of Representatives to begin three hours of testimony about Ticketmaster. It is well known in our industry that some portion of the service charges Ticketmaster collects on its sale of tickets is distributed back to the promoters in the venues. It is this incestuous relationship and the lack of any national competition for Ticketmaster that has created the situation we're dealing with today. And I think that Taylor Swift is of the level that if she wanted to to call attention to this issue there would be hearings. There's already politicians who say that they want this investigated like AOC saying that the Ticketmaster Live Nation monopoly should get broken up. I think this is a flashpoint and I think that Taylor Swift is so popular that

this isn't going away. Jason Kebler, Vice, he's got a podcast called Cyber, The People vs. Ticketmaster, in a minute on Today Explained. Support for Today Explained comes from Ramp. Ramp is the corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. With Ramp, you're able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions and automate expense reporting so you can stop wasting time at the end of every month. And now you can get $250 when you join Ramp. You can go to ramp.com slash explained, ramp.com slash explained, r-a-m-p.com slash explained.

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It must be exhausting always waiting for the site to reload. Ooh, Ticketmaster and its parent company, Live Nation, a case that Taylor Swift has breathed new life into, and a case that Morgan Harper from the American Economic Liberties Project has been on for a while now. So I work for an organization that's an anti-monopoly organization, and we had done some research that identified Live Nation Ticketmaster as one of the key monopolies that were a problem in the economy and that the government didn't do enough to stop when they merged in 2010. And this problem here, it predates Taylor Swift, but it isn't as old as Ticketmaster because this wasn't always as big a problem as it is right now.

When does this start to get really problematic? Well, there were people as early, you know, as the 90s saying that something was up with Ticketmaster. And, you know, in the mid 90s, Pearl Jam, if people remember Pearl Jam. Pearl Jam versus Ticketmaster. Classic battle of art versus commerce right there. Bruce Springsteen has spoken out about this issue before. What really started to accelerate a lot of the harms was when Ticketmaster and Live Nation came together in 2010. So before that merger, Ticketmaster controlled about 70% of the ticketing market.

But when you combine them with Live Nation that also is managing artists and running tours, running the promotional companies that organize tours, well, then you start to have a vertical integration that is a tremendous amount of power and it's very difficult for anyone to compete with that. Company execs say the deal will revive the music industry by making everything more efficient. Does anyone speak up in the moment? A ton of people were speaking up. I mean, that's almost what makes this kind of crazy. I mean,

it's great to see the momentum right now, but there have been so many people, independent venue owners, artists, consumer advocates that were ringing the alarm about the dangers of this merger leading up to 2010. Their companies are both Goliaths, so their unification will create a business with extraordinary market power and clout, unlike any that I've ever seen in my lifetime. And they were ignored. The Department of Justice was asleep at the wheel, you know, we would argue, and said, you know, hey, Ticketmaster Live Nation, you make a little changes here, divest a little bit here, and we're just going to let this proceed. And wink, wink,

we think, you know, it'll not be anti-competitive if you say so. So they negotiated this consent decree and Live Nation Ticketmaster has pretty much been blowing through it since then. I think a lot of people just want to get tickets without paying a ton of fees and, you know, getting like placed in some 12-hour queue online at 10 a.m. How does Ticketmaster and Live Nation make that experience worse for people? Essentially, you know, when an artist says that they're going to go on tour, well, there's a company that is managing that tour for them. And then the company decides which ticketing service they're going to use for that tour. And certain venues, some of which Live Nation owns,

they actually now also own venues, they say, if you want to come to our venue, well, then you have to use Ticketmaster. And then once you're in the throes of the monopolist, right, well, then you're stuck. And they're going to start being able to charge fees and they're going to include these service fees that, you know, in some cases up to 78% of the ticket. And what is that money going towards? Who knows?

Because they don't have to tell you because they know that that artist and the fan doesn't have anywhere else to go if they want to attend that concert. So that's kind of, you know, how this works is it's contracts, it's somewhat in the background, but then what it trickles down to is fans and consumers having a really bad experience and not totally understanding why. But it's the monopoly behavior behind that that they're engaging in anti-competitive tactics. How does Live Nation and Ticketmaster respond to the claim that they control way too many levels of this market? You know, the key response is one that you will often hear from monopolists.

They will most directly point to some other company that is in the market that people have heard of. So in this case, I would say, Live Nation, Ticketmaster often will say, we can't possibly be a monopoly. There's another company that does things like we do, AEG. And so how could it possibly be that we're a monopoly when there's another company, right? And that is such a ridiculous argument because we don't have all of the exact data, but let's say AEG maybe controls 20% of the market. It's absolutely the case that there can be other companies that are operating, but none of them are even coming close to the amount of market share that Live Nation Ticketmaster

controls. And more importantly, they are not controlling all these different business streams that we described. And so that's what really makes this monopoly-like power so, so dangerous to anyone else who is trying to make money in the live events industry, is that they're vertically integrated, there are multiple lines of business, and they have all this data that's overlaying everything that they can then use for anti-competitive purposes against anyone who becomes a threat. And we found out late last week that the Justice Department has in fact opened up an antitrust investigation into Ticketmaster and Live Nation, which is of course ironic because over 10 years ago, they had no serious qualms with this merger. What do you expect to come of this investigation? And what does the solution look like? Is it breaking up Live Nation and Ticketmaster? Is it reducing their share of

this market? What is it? So, you know, it's a little early to say exactly what that would look like. But here's the distinction. You know, with the 2010 merger that was approved, a lot of what came about in the consent decree, which is essentially like negotiated settlement of like, okay, we're going to let this go through, but here are the terms that you have to agree to, right? And a lot of those were what are called behavioral remedies, which really just says like, okay, you know, you need to promise to us that you're not going to retaliate against your independent venue competitors or something like that, for example, right? And so what we have now is the ability to actually sue and say, hey, one, you're not complying with the terms of the consent decree, potentially, or at a very minimum, you know, this investigation is going to look into the potential for what are called structural remedies,

actually looking at potentially divestitures that, you know, they need to get rid of certain lines of business. And it's not just the Department of Justice that's looking into this. There's legislative action in the works, too, right? I believe Amy Klobuchar really hates Ticketmaster. That's where I want to put the Taylor Swift fans. Right on that. Right on antitrust. Because that story of Ticketmaster, separate from the tech companies, that is a story of a monopoly gone wild. Yeah. There are a lot of people on the Hill. So actually, yeah, Senator Klobuchar, Senator Blumenthal, they sent a letter that was calling out some of the issues with Live Nation Ticketmaster, and they both reiterated

their concerns about the merger and the monopoly-like power that the company has? A lot of questions. It is not just about Taylor Swift. This has been going on. It's about prices, hidden fees that are way too high. It's about site disruptions and the kind of thing. And of course, you could anticipate it. But where else are you going to go to sell your tickets when there's only one game in town? And then there are a lot of state attorneys general. So that's this whole other layer of activity that's been happening over the past few days as there's been so much attention, you know, with the Taylor Swift tour that we're seeing AGs in Tennessee and North Carolina saying that they're going to be looking into this issue and they're hearing from a lot of

their constituents. And the Swifties on the Today Explained team inform me that she's the kind of artist who really cares about her reputation. And ultimately, if she ends up helping solve this issue, it might just give her the most relevant legacy of any artist ever. I mean, hey, I'm a convert. Let's do it Morgan Harper is the director of policy and advocacy at an anti-monopoly organization

called the American Economic Liberties Project it's part of the Breakup Ticketmaster Coalition this Today Explained episode was produced

by Amanda Llewellyn Swifty edited by Matthew Collette Swifty fact checked by Matthewlewellyn. Swifty. Edited by Matthew Collette. Swifty. Fact-checked by Matthew and Laura Bullard. Swifty adjacent. Mixed and mastered by Paul Robert Mounsey. I mean, Swifty.

And hosted by me, I'm Sean Ramos. For more of a Beyonce guy myself, but let me tell y'all something about scoring tickets to live events. All you ever really have to do is show up the night of the show with a sign that says looking for one ticket. And I promise you, no matter what the show, no matter what tickets are going for on StubHub the week before or the day of, night, in my dreams. I know I'm gonna be with you, so I take my time.

Are you ready for it? When I was a robber, first time that he saw me. Stealing hearts and running off and never saying sorry. But if I'm a decent, he can join the heist and we'll move to an island. And he can be my jailer. Virgin to the tailor.