Ticketmaster was founded in 1976 by two Arizona State University students, Albert Leffler and Peter Gadwa. The company was founded to make concert tickets more accessible and affordable, but results show that the exact opposite is happening. On the release day of tickets for Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, ticket prices ranged from hundreds to thousands of dollars, or at least that’s what Ticketmaster told its customers. With fees and extra taxes, tickets ended up being outrageously priced. These prices have still gone up significantly after the release of Eras Tour tickets, and prices for other concerts have gone up drastically since then as well, according to Time Magazine.
Taylor Swift announced her Eras Tour in November 2022, which caused extreme excitement and engagement from Swifties looking to buy tickets for U.S. concert dates. The popularity of the Eras Tour is unmatched by any past musical tour, with a predicted gross of $2.2 million in ticket sales for just the North American leg of the tour, according to Time Magazine. In November of 2022, Ticketmaster set up a verified fan presale beforehand that was meant to regulate the chaos of mass ticket purchases. Unfortunately, this did not go as planned. Rather than regulating website traffic, fans waited in the queue for up to a day, and by the end of the presale, there were no tickets left for a general sale.
The general sale ended up being canceled due to lack of ticket availability. “I’m not going to make excuses for anyone,” Swift said on her Instagram. “We asked them [Ticketmaster], multiple times, if they could handle this kind of demand, and we were assured that they could.”
Not only have the prices of tickets sold on Ticketmaster become outrageously high since the announcement of the Eras Tour, but they’ve been rising for decades. According to late night host John Oliver on his show “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver”, “the average price of a popular concert has more than tripled since the mid-nineties, vastly outpacing inflation.” This not only makes concert tickets extremely inaccessible, but it also raises the possibility of bots and scalpers getting all tickets.
Before the introduction of the online ticket market, resellers had to stand outside of a venue or ticket booth in hopes of finding tickets to resell. Now, with Ticketmaster’s online website, scalpers are able to create multiple accounts and buy tickets immediately with the intention of selling them at a much steeper price. According to Audience Republic, a ticket promoting company, unknowing fans often pay way more than necessary for a show, as they mistakenly think they are buying tickets directly from the source.
With all this being said, are inaccessible, expensive tickets the new normal? Will the accessibility of tickets be improved upon in the future because of this? Unfortunately, Taylor Swift’s tour isn’t the only one that’s forced fans to reach deep in their wallets for tickets. In September 2023, country and folk singer Zach Bryan announced his U.S. tour, the Quittin’ Time Tour. Once again, Ticketmaster and scalpers took advantage of people wanting to go to the concert, forcing tickets to be priced in the hundreds, with some up to $600. Julia Soeder, a writer for The Loyola Phoenix newspaper, said in her article regarding the negative effects of Ticketmaster that she “began to feel her jaw tighten, eyebrows furrow, and palms sweat.” Many ticket buyers shared a similar experience, making the concert-going experience overall more stressful and frustrating than fun.
Unfortunately, Swift’s Eras Tour, as well as Bryan’s Quittin’ Time Tour, are all telling examples of the future of ticket-buying as we know it. The accessibility of Ticketmaster is increasingly getting lower, and the concert experience has become more stressful and much less enjoyable. Although it seems like ever-soaring ticket prices are the new normal, it needs to be stopped, and accessibility of tickets needs to be addressed by ticket sellers and buyers.
