Brought Swiftly to Justice: How a Pop Star’s Ticketing Scandal Made Waves in Antitrust Legislation

Swift plays a sold-out stadium in Arlington, Texas—one stop of many on her months-long Eras Tour. Photo by Ronald Woan.

Pop icon Taylor Swift surprised millions of fans on November 1, 2022, by announcing a five-month-long “Eras Tour.” This was the first time Swift would be returning to live performance after the COVID-19 pandemic and the first time she would be performing a number of new albums live. Her announcement took the internet by storm as excited “Swifties”—an affectionate name for Swift fans—prepared for what many already predicted would be a competitive ticket-purchasing experience. 

The reality of Swift’s ticket sale was far more harrowing. Fans were subjected to hours-long wait times, frequent site crashes, and glitches at checkout that resulted in them losing the tickets in their carts seconds before clicking “buy.” And this was only the presale. 

Swift’s team had initially planned a multi-phase ticket rollout that involved a Verified Fan presale code that could be accessed by lottery, a presale code exclusive only to Capital One cardholders, and a general sale. After the presale amounted to a disaster, the general sale was canceled with less than 24 hours’ notice due to “extraordinarily high demands on ticketing systems and insufficient remaining ticket inventory to meet that demand.” 

Swift took to social media following the debacle. In a statement on her Instagram story, she decried the overall inability to meet the demand for tickets, comparing fan experiences of obtaining tickets to “several bear attacks.” She insisted her team had been promised in advance that the high demand and website traffic would be handled, and said that her team was looking into ways to improve ticket-purchasing experiences going forward. This, however, did not change the fact that most fans were left tired and angry and ultimately ticketless.

The driver behind this fiasco was ticketing giant Ticketmaster, which merged with Live Nation Entertainment, the world’s biggest concert promoter, in 2010. This merger effectively created a ticketing monopoly, with parent company Live Nation controlling over 140 concert venues globally, selling roughly 140 million tickets for over 22,000 events per year. And this was only at the time of the acquisition—a decade later, Live Nation’s domain has expanded further, netting over 282.3 million tickets sold and owning 259 venues in 2021. 

In 2010, many litigators were prepared to fight the merger, citing concerns about possible retaliation, or the punishment of venues or artists for contracting with competing ticketing platforms. The U.S. Department of Justice, however, required the two companies to divest several of their assets upon merging, quelling many lawyers’ and antitrust advocates’ worries. The terms were only designed to last for 10 years and would expire in 2020. At the time, many experts reasoned that the DOJ’s conditions were enough to prevent Live Nation from devolving into a monopoly. 

Despite the DOJ’s efforts, this has not been the case in practice; in 2019, a year before the merger’s antitrust provisions were set to expire, the DOJ uncovered repeated violations of this agreement by Live Nation. One public instance of this occurred in 2018 when the company came under fire for retaliating against concert venues owned by its competitors. One of Live Nation’s ventures is an artist management company, which allows the company to exert control over artists’ touring schedules. As a result, according to allegations by a competing ticketing platform, Live Nation was able to pressure various venues into contracting with Ticketmaster out of fear that they would lose valuable shows if Ticketmaster was not used as the vendor—clearly a form of retaliation, and a violation of antitrust law. 

But the DOJ’s responses to these issues have amounted to nothing more than slaps on the wrist. The Live Nation machine has established itself as the kingpin of modern ticketing, providing a subpar purchasing experience with little to no consequences since artists and venues risk much more if they choose not to do business with Live Nation or any of its subsidiaries. 

This leads to consequences not just for artists and venues, but for the consumer, as well. Aside from a glitchy and inaccessible online ticket-buying process, Ticketmaster’s monopoly allows it to impose high service and processing fees that result in markups of anywhere between 40 to 50% of base ticket prices. One artist even reported seeing a service fee of 82% of the original price. Artists also claim not to possess any knowledge of how high these fees will be before the tickets go on sale. 

It is not clear what those fees are being used for, either—according to Ticketmaster’s website, “In almost all cases, Ticketmaster adds a service fee (also known as a convenience charge) to the face value price, or in the case of a resale ticket to the listing price, of each ticket. The service fee varies by event based on our agreement with each individual client.” This description fails to disclose what the company is actually doing with that money. Regarding processing fees, Ticketmaster’s website openly admits that the company may make a profit off of this added amount in some cases.

In 2019, Congress attempted to pass a bill called the Better Oversight of Secondary Sales and Accountability in Concert Ticketing Act, which would demand more transparency from ticketing companies to consumers surrounding these hidden service fees. Unfortunately, this was to no avail: The “BOSS Act” ultimately stalled in committee, and little notable action has been taken to mitigate ticketing fees ever since. 

It seemed like this would be the unshakeable status quo, until the Eras Tour presale. Now, Live Nation may finally be facing the music. 

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York’s 14th district, came forward on social media shortly after the presale, criticizing Ticketmaster’s monopolistic behavior. She wrote, “Daily reminder that Ticketmaster is a monopoly, [its] merger with LiveNation should never have been approved, and they need to be reigned in. Break them up.” 

The angst surrounding ticket sales also created opportunities for fans to come together and organize. One such group is Vigilante Legal, a nonprofit organization of Swifties with legal backgrounds dedicated to dismantling the Ticketmaster-Live Nation merger. The group was formed after many of the core members of lawyers, computer scientists, government employees, and other experts struggled to obtain tour tickets themselves. Vigilante Legal’s priorities are mainly to “assist the government in gathering evidence. The law in these scenarios, especially in antitrust, affords citizens the right to bring cases on behalf of the government in the betterment of consumers,” one founding member told Business Insider. 

The group’s research has since led to findings of other legal violations by Ticketmaster, especially concerning the Americans with Disabilities Act. Vigilante Legal’s strategy is to compile a list of these violations, crowdsourced from other Swifties on social media, as evidence that the company is engaging in unethical business practices. It plans to file a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission. This step is accompanied by a fan-based email campaign to members of Congress and attorneys general, urging them to join the fight against Ticketmaster and Live Nation.

Another organization comes out of Voters of Tomorrow, a Gen Z-led political movement fighting to mobilize young voters across the United States. In response to the Eras Tour controversy, the organization created the Swifties Working to Increase Fairness from Ticketmaster initiative—abbreviated to S.W.I.F.T.—which advocates for federal oversight of corporations to prevent future monopolization. 

All of this backlash reached a fever pitch in January when several prominent music industry figures—including Joe Berchtold, the president and CFO of Live Nation—were called to testify in a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing investigating monopolistic practices in the ticketing industry. While hearings surrounding antitrust legislation and monopolies have dated back to the days of the Industrial Revolution, the proceedings of this one were far from standard. For one thing, the issue has quelled tensions across the aisle, at least for the time being. Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, sarcastically congratulated Berchtold for “an absolutely stunning achievement” of joining “Republicans and Democrats in an absolutely unified cause.” 

Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota and chair of the Judiciary Subcommittee on Competition Policy, Antitrust, and Consumer Rights, attributed the sense of urgency surrounding this particular antitrust hearing to the sheer volume and power of the fans’ advocacy efforts. She told NPR, “A whole bunch of Swift fans is something that no one’s ever dealt with in Congress,” and is thus more likely to generate real action than previous groups aiming to address the same things. She also stressed the importance of the internet and social media to these efforts: “There becomes this pitch point where there’s so much anger from the public, and now it might be online,” she said. 

While the end of the hearing bore no concrete solutions to Live Nation’s monopoly, from the presale rigamarole to its online backlash to the aftermath in the Senate, one thing becomes exceptionally clear: In a new era of political organization stemming from online, youth-led mobilizing, Swifties and other artist fan bases may be at the forefront of future antitrust advocacy. Other movements ought to take note.

Renuka Balakrishnan (BC ’24) is a Staff Writer and former senior editor for CPR, studying history and political science. She is a proud Swiftie and will be attending the Eras Tour in May.