You may know the drill. You get online at 10am, several months before the show, and receive a place in the virtual queue. Perhaps you notice with dismay that your number is larger than the capacity of the venue. Perhaps you then lose your place because you’ve been misidentified as a bot, or the site crashes altogether. If you make it to the front, you may well wonder why £100 (plus about £20 in opaque surcharges) now qualifies as a cheap seat. And that’s if there are any cheap seats left, not just inflated VIP packages. And you may ask yourself why it has to be like this.
When you don’t get what you want, you tend to look for someone to blame. That someone is usually Ticketmaster. The company, which merged with concert promoters Live Nation in 2010 to form Live Nation Entertainment, sells about 70% of all concert tickets worldwide, and an even greater proportion of the arena and stadium market. In 2024, Live Nation generated a record $23.2bn (£17.5bn) in revenue, with Ticketmaster selling 637m tickets. Rivals such as See Tickets (owned by Germany’s CTS Eventim) and AXS (the ticketing arm of promoters AEG Presents) aren’t exactly minnows but Ticketmaster has become a synonym for ticketing: a lightning rod and a punchbag.
In the US, Ticketmaster’s current problems stem from a cardinal error: getting on the wrong side of Swifties. In November 2022, the company failed to stagger the presale for Taylor Swift’s Eras tour, listing all 2m tickets simultaneously. The colossal demand overwhelmed the servers, causing myriad problems. Swift expressed her disappointment. Ticketmaster grovelled. Last May, the US justice department (DOJ) filed an antitrust suit, now backed by 39 states, which alleges that Live Nation and Ticketmaster use their “power and influence … to freeze innovation and bend the industry to their own benefit”.
I buy tickets all the time from industries I hate in hopes that one day they realize they should treat customers better. Until then I’ll keep buying tickets.
Because as I’ve gotten older and I can afford things, I realized there’s no effort to prevent this from other people. So why would I miss out. It’s not like we’re on the right where they will protest and collectively not stop until they get their thing actioned.
Funny, I go the opposite route. If a company does something to bother me enough, I will easily forego whatever experience they are providing. There is no lack of meaningful entertainment in this world, why further encourage shittiness when I can just enjoy something else? I do the same with prices. Too expensive? Fuck it, guess I don’t do that anymore. Here’s looking at you Phish; nothing against the band and understand their pricing, but I am not paying over $100 (especially now back w ticketmaster no less) for a concert. It doesn’t bother me if others do, it just becomes ‘not for me.’ Like everything, to each their own though.
I’ve gone the other way. It’s the people around me who all complain that they dislike things but don’t do anything that have annoyed me. I’ve taken a radically different approach. I’ll enjoy myself and encourage those industries until things get so bad it motivates these people to maybe take action instead of waiting until it’s too late. I’ll help make things worse.
I buy multiple YouTube premium accounts. I watch ads until the very end. Whenever I see a content creator who allows more ad breaks, I donate to their channel, upvote and subscribe. I participate regularly on Reddit subs like marvel, often creating posts like “who is your favorite marvel character to go on a coffee date with teahee” I become the content consumer they want me to be because what’s the worst that can happen.
So keep enabling the problem, I guess. I’m sure that’ll make them see the error in their ways…
What else am I suppose to do. Wait around for everybody else to get a backbone. I’ll never understand why we can all muster the energy to protest a behemoth that wouldn’t be impacted by boycott but fail to boycott smaller players that would feel it. It’s all by design. There’s no grass roots anything. It’s all just what we’re allowed to protest and boycott.