By Sophia Pu | Production Chief
At least $10,000- that is the price to see Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, thanks to price gouging on ticket distributor Ticketmaster. These insane prices are leaving the majority of music fans in the dust.
Ticketmaster reigns over 70 percent of the ticket market, of which Swift’s concert is but a small part. Chances to see other musical artists such as Bruno Mars, Bruce Springsteen, and Harry Styles also reached prices of $2,500, $4,000, and $3,000 respectively. These extraordinarily high costs are primarily because of three factors: dynamic pricing, second hand sales, and lack of competition.
Dynamic pricing is a strategy used by corporations where the cost of a product fluctuates with surges in demand. This allows companies like Ticketmaster to profit off of peak times. While this allows more money to go to artists and their crews, it becomes problematic when there are millions of people fighting for tickets at the same time.
Ticketmaster reported that during the Verified Fan presale for Swift’s Eras Tour, over 3.5 billion fans and bots surged onto their website. Ticketmaster also held back tickets for other selling platforms, producing an artificial lack of supply.
Resellers are also a major contributor in driving up prices. According to Time, 90 percent of tickets are reserved for credit card companies, radio stations, and other secondhand sellers, while most available tickets are scooped up by bots and scalpers. These scalpers deplete the supply, forcing fans to buy their tickets on other sites at a marked up price. Variety reports that those prices can increase by 50 to 7,000 percent of the original value.
Finally, after they merged with Live Nation in 2010, Ticketmaster secured their dominance over the ticket market by establishing a monopoly. According to Public Knowledge, Live Nation is the biggest promoter and manager of venues and artists, giving Ticketmaster exclusive control over where artists perform and the sale of their tickets. Despite the Department of Justice’s requirement that they license their software to competition and release some of their assets, Ticketmaster has escaped accountability for decades.
Luckily however, after the White House, numerous legislators, and millions of Swift fans called for an end to the empire, the Senate will investigate Ticketmaster’s chokehold on the industry. If the panel finds the company guilty of violating antitrust laws that prevent monopolies, the superpower could be broken up. However, more action is needed to prevent this price gouging from happening in the future.
In Ireland, a law was passed banning the resale of tickets above face value. Similar legislation should be passed in the United States, and sellers should be required to display a ticket’s original market value to buyers. Bills like the BOTs Act of 2016 should be more strictly enforced to ensure ticket brokers cannot overwhelm ticketing systems and stand in the way of true fans.
In the meantime, artists should opt out of dynamic pricing and set a reasonable maximum price for tickets. Fans can avoid Ticketmaster and find cheaper tickets on secondhand platforms like Seat Geek and Game Time, but should be wary of high costs on StubHub. If buying on Ticketmaster is inevitable, try logging on before and after peak demand for the lowest prices.
While unreasonably high ticket prices are something music fans know all too well, they should not be forced to tolerate it. It is the job of the government to protect its citizens by breaking up Ticketmaster and making sure they never ever get back together.
