Ticketmaster Needs To Adjust Their Ticket Selling Methods

When Taylor Swift announced her Eras Tour, everyone began to rethink the way concert tickets should be sold. Swift decided to use Ticketmaster, the world’s largest ticket marketplace.  This platform caused many issues and made fans so mad that they are in the process of trying to sue the company.

The way Ticketmaster decided to sell these tickets is by having two presales, one was the verified fan presale and the other was the Capital One card presale. The point of having these presales was to keep bots and scammers away, so real fans have a better chance of purchasing these tickets. Unfortunately, this did not work due to a couple errors made by Ticketmaster.

While Ticketmaster caused many issues, they are not the only problem in this situation. There was also a much higher demand for tickets than ever seen before. 3.5 million people registered to join the verified fan sale. To accommodate the demand of tickets, Taylor Swift would have to have a full stadium show every day for two and a half years. 

A reason for this extra high demand could be that people couldn’t go to concerts for years because of COVID. People are now excited to get back to normal and have fun at concerts. A lot of people claim that these days getting tickets is much more difficult than it used to be back in 2019. 

The biggest obstacle when it comes to purchasing concert tickets is scammers and resellers. Some people buy tickets just to resell them for crazy prices and make a profit. This keeps the fans who genuinely want to go to the concert from receiving tickets at a face value price. 

Resellers are taking advantage of the lengths super fans will go to when seeing their favorite artist live. This happened during Harry Styles’ Love On Tour. Tickets were being resold for hundreds, and some even thousands of dollars. It was completely unreasonable and you couldn’t find a ticket under $500. 

Since all of the tickets are being resold for $500 or more, people try to buy tickets from sketchy websites. Some of these scammers are smart, so they overprice the tickets for around $200 to make it seem like a deal in comparison to the overpriced tickets. It is hard to differentiate the reliable websites from the unreliable ones, so many people, like me, fall for this trap. 

Some people resort to trying to buy tickets the night before or day of, but this is a really risky move. Most of the time resellers will lower their prices as it gets closer to the concert date, since they need to make a profit. I’ve noticed that for some shows, people don’t drop their prices until only an hour before the show which leaves almost no time to get there and be ready.

Ticketmaster needs to stop charging so many extra fees on top of the ticket price. The lawsuit being filed against Ticketmaster states that, “Ticketmaster does not charge high prices to give a better service, it charges higher prices because it has no real competition and wants to take every dollar it can from buyers.”

Harry Styles’ most recent tour in the United States was a residency tour that broke the record for the most consecutive shows at Madison Square Garden. Styles performed fifteen, ten, or five shows at a few main cities instead of doing one or two shows in each state. This raises the question of whether other artists should consider doing this and if this is a better way to accommodate large numbers of fans. 

A great start to making the situation better would be to call back all of the tickets that are posted on reseller websites. Ed Sheeran did this in 2018 when he canceled ten thousand concert tickets that were being resold at overpriced rates. This allowed 90% of his concert tickets to be sold at face value. 

Ticketmaster needs to find a way to make the ticket buying process easier for fans. They need to require codes when you first enter the queue and they need to be mindful about the amount of codes being sent out. They also need to restrict the amount of tickets available during presales, so the general sale has enough tickets. 

The process of buying tickets has changed for the worse and solutions need to be found to make ticket buying more efficient and convenient. The future of ticket buying is yet to be determined in an age where greed takes precedence over all.