Live music is a mess right now.
Make no mistake: Ticketmaster deserves the scorn that it is currently receiving from Taylor Swift’s listenership, a population of such size and power that it probably merits a spot in the United Nations. Earlier this week, the company’s just-for-fans presale of tickets to Swift’s 2023 concert tour was ridden with bugs and delays. More shocking, Ticketmaster then canceled the general-public sale due to technical issues and—are you ready for it?—a lack of inventory. Yes, amid much confusion, the presale became (for now) the only sale. The fiasco appears to present a tidy parable about what happens to institutional competence when a company holds what many lawmakers allege to be monopolistic power for more than a decade.
Yet the story is bigger than Ticketmaster, and perhaps bigger than even Taylor Swift. (She weighed in today: “It’s truly amazing that 2.4 million people got tickets, but it really pisses me off that a lot of them feel like they went through several bear attacks to get them.”) The 32-year-old singer-songwriter is dominating at a time when live tours are, by many estimations, costlier to embark on, more difficult to pull off, and more in demand than they ever have been. Three big trends may explain why a series of annoying glitches has taken on the air of an international incident.
According to Ticketmaster, the desire for Swift’s tickets smote all records and reasonable expectations. Fourteen million users—and bots—tried to buy tickets, the company’s chair said, and a now-deleted Ticketmaster blog post reported that the presale traffic eclipsed any previous peak by a factor of four. To meet such demand, Swift would have to play “over 900 stadium shows (almost 20x the number of shows she is doing),” Ticketmaster said. The company’s numbers raise a lot of questions—how much of a role did resellers play, for example?—but the underlying takeaway seems correct: The breadth and intensity of Swift’s fandom right now is extraordinary.
Think about it. A decade and a half into superstardom, Swift somehow retains the fascination of the most important constituency for pop music: teenagers. But she is also a cross-generational object of acclaim working in her prime, consistently winning Album of the Year Grammys and smashing sales records (her latest album, Midnights, had better first-week sales than any other album by any other artist in the past seven years).
