Swiftly resolved? The problems in concert ticketing – and how to fix them
Last year, thousands faced disaster when trying to buy tickets for Taylor Swift’s Eras tour in the US. Fans said the presale access codes they were given didn’t work properly and the Ticketmaster website crashed repeatedly. As a result, the main sale was cancelled and a group of fans filed a lawsuit accusing the company of fraud, pricefixing and anti-trust violations. “We need to do better and we will,” said Joe Berchtold, president of Ticketmaster’s parent company Live Nation.
In the UK and Europe this month, presales for various dates and locations opened at different times and different days, to try and avoid the same issues – but fans have found the process stressful and unpredictable. We spoke to some of them about the difficulty of buying Swift tickets, and to people across the industry about how the ticketing system can be improved.
How transparent is the pricing and distribution system?
Ticket prices for the primary market (those sold through a tour’s official ticket partners) are determined by the artist and their team alongside the tour promoter. Sometimes, they employ dynamic pricing where ticket prices fluctuate according to demand, as they do in the airline industry. While this doesn’t seem to have been in play for the Taylor Swift presales, Ticketmaster has used it in the recent past for shows by Harry Styles and Coldplay (and got flack due to prices sometimes doubling).
For artists playing arenas and stadiums, prices typically fluctuate depending on how close the tickets get you to the stage. Then there’s the growing popularity of various VIP packages which offer a host of add-ons (of varying quality) for an extra fee. Swift fans only found out how much they were expected to pay for tickets once they made it through the giant online queues to the seat allocation: the fans we spoke to for this article reported price tags that ranged from £78 to £600 for a single ticket.
What makes it even more confusing is that multiple ticket companies will usually be involved in selling tickets for one show. Adam Webb, campaign manager at campaign group FanFair Alliance, explains: “At the majority of UK venues, box office contracts are usually outsourced to a third-party ticket company, which can be guaranteed an allocation of up to 60-70% of the tickets.” Promoters will then appoint a range of other companies to sell the rest, “so it’s quite common to see two, three or four official ticket agents at UK shows,” he says. For the Eras tour in the UK and Europe, there are five official providers operating across the different territories: Ticketmaster, AXS, Eventim, See Tickets and eBilet.
That’s before you get to secondary resale sites such as Viagogo and StubHub. Ticket prices are determined by the third-party seller and based on demand, hence they can reach extortionate levels. A recent listing on Viagogo priced up one ticket for Swift’s 21 June Wembley Stadium date from £49 face value to £393, plus a £74 booking and “handling” fee.
How much preparation does it take to get a Swift ticket?
Swift fans have been employing complex strategies involving spreadsheets, group chats, multiple computers and social media in order to aid their success in getting tickets. Hopeful fans needed to register for a presale code, which they already had if they’d pre-ordered Swift’s Midnights album last year. . Registration didn’t guarantee a code, and some were waitlisted; even those with codes are then put into a queue to buy tickets, their position seemingly random.
Andrea Rogers-Mühlhaus, a Swift fan who lives in Munich, had multiple presale codes and three computers set up for presale day. She and a friend tried to get tickets in Munich, Milan and Zurich but couldn’t get any that were in line with their €300 per-person budget.
After crying and feeling like she wanted to “throw up” from stress, Rogers-Mühlhaus’s husband got lucky. He managed to track down another code for Warsaw and secured affordable tickets. “I’m incredibly impressed,” she says. “I kept saying, ‘you can go all the way to the basket but it’s going to time out because it happened to me’. But it’s like he walked into a grocery store, picked up an apple, went to the checkout and it was his. It was so flawless.”
The Guardian’s deputy music editor Laura Snapes, who was eventually successful in buying tickets, has this tip: “Check again later once it seems as though a date is sold out, to try buying individual tickets – I got two in a row that way – and to keep searching for tickets even if it says none are found.”
What other issues have fans faced?
As well as these frustrations, French fans were left hanging last week after the sale was suspended due to a website glitch. And even fans who got through to the sale found themselves repeatedly getting timed out of the website, or panicking in the face of a 90-second checkout window.
Disabled fans trying to get tickets to the Wembley Stadium dates were faced with even more issues. They needed to call an access line managed by the venue directly, which Swift fan India Rose Meade says wasn’t functional on Monday’s presale day. “It would connect to the point that it would say ‘this line is too busy, please try again later’ and cut out after three or four seconds. It did that from opening time all the way through to the end of the day.” Meade eventually got hold of tickets by calling a different number on Tuesday.
Similarly, it took Jack Fermor-Worrell until 1.30pm on Tuesday afternoon “to reach an actual human being”. Then, he was faced with an option of buying a ticket for £197.25 – a “much higher price” than he’d hoped for. In a complaint written to the venue FermorWorrell said: “I feel beyond let down and somewhat insulted by the service that Wembley Stadium has provided to its disabled patrons throughout this entire experience.”
Is it a simple matter of demand outstripping supply?
A big part of the problem is unprecedented demand for the Swift shows. The 131-date tour could become the first in history to reach more than $1bn in ticket sales. Part of this is due to the fact that Swift is “having a moment”, says ticketing expert and consultant Tim Chambers: after dipping in favour at the end of the 2010s, Swift is back on top. Chambers calls the tour the “epitome of a frothy Fomo event”. Each show lasts more than three hours, encompassing highlights from her back catalogue to date.
There’s also pent-up demand: it’s
Swift’s first tour since her 2017-18 Reputation dates. Since then, as Chambers points out, “we’ve had the pandemic, which forced a lockdown and limitation of live, and the re-recording of her back catalogue, so the tour is well-timed”.
Speaking of Covid, there’s also what economist Will Page correctly predicted to be “the slingshot” effect at play. After a two-year downturn of the live music industry, ticket sales bounced back last year as fans and artists clamoured to get back into venues to make up for lost time. According to data from trade title Pollstar, which concerns the US market, total ticket sale gross hit $6.28bn in 2022, up 13.2% on the pre-pandemic year of 2019. The publication is predicting a record-setting year at the box office thanks in large part to a number of big-selling artists, including Swift, being on the road.
What would a better, fairer ticketing situation look like across the industry?
Beyond improving technology to better handle high demand, it’s difficult to pinpoint what a different solution might look like. While there are many reports of issues with the sales process, other fans have been satisfied. Swiftie Mollie Corrigan managed to get seven tickets thanks to a presale code she got by ordering Swift’s latest Midnights album. “It meant that longtime fans got priority with tickets, which has been great compared to the general sale system where it’s random, and a lot less people were trying for the tickets at one time.”
Pixies manager Richard Jones says
the issue lies in the complexity of the buying process. “I personally think they’ve tried to be too clever and made the entire process far too frustrating and difficult for people, who have other things going on in their lives. Yes, the demand is insane but knowing that, they need to prepare in a more sensible way. Make it more streamlined, make it very clear what you need to do to try and get a ticket and put all the dates on sale at the same time.”
When it comes to the secondary market, Jones says artists and their teams could have better control and “immediately” cancel any tickets that show up on websites like Viagogo and StubHub, a process he calls “complex, but very doable”.
Phil Hutcheon, who heads up ethical ticketing platform Dice, says the issues associated with the Eras tour create a “lack of trust” in the market. His platform advertises prices up front and doesn’t allow reselling. If fans can’t go to a sold-out show, organisers can deploy an option where, at the tap of a button, a refund is issued and the ticket goes to someone on a waiting list. “It’s not rocket science – it should be the same as buying a toaster on Amazon,” he says.
“At a basic level I think most of us want transparency,” concludes FanFair
Alliance’s Webb. “We want clear upfront info about which companies are licensed to sell tickets, the pricing, and any important information about its use. And we also want to know where we can resell a ticket at the price paid or less, while cutting out the parasitical secondary market that invests nothing in UK culture.”
It’s not rocket science – it should be the same as buying a toaster on Amazon
Phil Hutcheon, Dice