American pop star Taylor Swift hit the Ticketmaster platform hard on Friday after ticket sales for her upcoming tour turned into chaos.
Ticketmaster, the digital platform that sells tickets for the singer’s US tour, decided Thursday to cancel the public sale of those tickets to the general public due to the “extremely heavy weight on the ticket system” and because there are still not enough tickets . they were in stock. The company had already sold more than two million pre-sale tickets for select groups of Taylor Swift fans. Due to the huge demand, the website also crashed several times.
Numerous “Swifties” have expressed their dissatisfaction with Ticketmaster’s way of working on social networking sites. They complain that they had to queue digitally for hours on a dodgy website.
• Taylor Swift concert tickets are fetching exorbitant prices in the US
In a statement on Instagram, Swift herself does not spare criticism of Ticketmaster. “It’s really great that 2.4 million people managed to get tickets, but it pisses me off that many of them feel like they had to go through a nightmare to get them,” she writes. ‘I won’t apologize to anyone. We asked them several times if they could handle this kind of request. And they assured us they could.’
“It’s unbearable for me to see mistakes happen and not have recourse against them,” Swift continues, but doesn’t name Ticketmaster. It remains very difficult to “trust an external entity”, she still plays her.
Judicial investigation
The case also chafed ticket seller Ticketmaster’s de facto monopoly position. Several members of Congress have already expressed their disappointment this week. According to the newspaper New York Times The US Department of Justice has also opened an antitrust investigation into the company. It is being investigated whether Live Nation, the parent company of Ticketmaster, has abused its power in the live music industry. The research goes back to before Swift’s ticket sales got into the soup.
Shares of Live Nation temporarily fell 9.5% on Friday, to the lowest level in nearly two years.
