Taylor Swift - Midnights

if I emailed @taylorswift13 like democrats email me:

Subj: Taylor, I'm begging.

Taylor, I've signed up for Verified Fan. I've checked my spam. I've refreshed Ticketmaster, and yet STILL I'm waitlisted at this crucial time.

Can you RUSH a presale code to me by 10AM tomorrow?

— Amy Farley (@amyfarley) November 15, 2022

It tooks me 5 hours 'in the queue' to eventually buy tickets

It took my daughter around that long to get her tickets, and after spending over $2000 or whatever the bank sent her an automatic fraud notification flagging the purchase and saying it would be cancelled if she did not confirm the purchase. Which she did and ... the bank cancelled it anyway. In a panic she called my wife, who called the bank, pissed, basically asking, you know, what the fuck? It got sorted in the end, though.

Other kid told me that she has lots of friends that didn't even get a shot at tix. Floor seats on stubhub are over in the thousands right now, lol. I saw Row 1/field tix being sold for $45,000. Good luck with that.

You're on your own, kid

This is what the monoculture looks like:

Current parenthood situation. Getting a full dose of the Taylor Swift concert @Ticketmaster presale fiasco. Going on hour four! pic.twitter.com/ZpBHkVoU4S

— Julián Castro (@JulianCastro) November 15, 2022

Daily reminder that Ticketmaster is a monopoly, it’s merger with LiveNation should never have been approved, and they need to be reigned in.

Break them up.

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) November 15, 2022

The Queue Has Been Temporarily Paused
2000+ People Ahead Of You pic.twitter.com/2L5h1VWTwF

— Texas A&M University (@TAMU) November 15, 2022

What's more stressful...registering for classes or trying to buy tickets to Taylor Swift's #TSTheErasTour? pic.twitter.com/1Dx0NYMfRr

— UGA (@universityofga) November 15, 2022

The Taylor Swift eras tour ticketmaster waiting room pic.twitter.com/Y5YBh9UWhQ

— Vulture (@vulture) November 15, 2022

Your kid is rich

lol years of babysitting, man. Anyway, it's a credit card, she's only ("only") on the hook for $300 of that.

more seriously i went through this (ended up saying fuck off to the whole thing) with springsteen and this whole business of big time concerts in 2022 is incredibly dispiriting. i get that things change but this is just obscene

Coworker started queueing just before 10 and said she finally got her tickets at quarter past three. Her husband never did manage to get through.

Reading reports that the ticket prices started out fairly reasonable (at least as far as these mega stadium shows go), but that the dynamic pricing model might have kicked in later?

My kid says dynamic pricing was indeed a thing.

xpost I did the same with Springsteen. I was, like, I love Springsteen, got verified fan code, waited in the queue and in the end said fuck this, too.

What I don't get, beyond the obvious explanation that Ticketmaster is a terrible garbage company, is how they claimed to be overwhelmed by the demand and not expecting this many people. But... didn't they set the number of verified presale slots "approved"? Shouldn't they have had a pretty good fucking idea of how many people would be trying to buy tickets?

I do not want to play devil's advocate, but I would not rule out them being overwhelmed by hackers and scalpers and other shitheads on a huge scale. Maybe the equivalent in terms of scale to a DOS attack. Should have been ready for that, too, though.

Ticket prices here in Kansas City MO seemed static this afternoon ($109 was what mine were), but maybe they became dynamic later. Service charges were like another 30-40% of the ticket price, though, plus another $50 for parking at a venue where you need a car to get there.

My kid says dynamic pricing was indeed a thing.

Not trying to single you or your kid out Josh, but I'm genuinely unclear on if there was dynamic pricing at play yesterday or not. I've seen absolute insistences on both sides that there was absolutely not dynamic pricing involved because Taylor wouldn't allow it, while others are absolutely swearing their was dynamic pricing going on.

I was just talking to someone about this today. It is pretty unclear, afaict. Were the tickets just expensive, or were they being dynamically inflated in real time? I'm pretty sure my kid said four of her six tickets, all in the same row, were one price, but the other two she bought (again, same row, same purchasing session, right next to the other four) were a little more expensive. That seems suspicious to me. Anyway, the idea that anyone would claim Taylor Swift "wouldn't allow it" is hilarious, because she sure allowed the sale of a whole lot of "VIP" tickets larded with merch, and besides, everyone else is doing it. There's no way Taylor Swift is going to be the righteous voice of reason when even Springsteen bought in.

FWIW, five VIP packages, ranging from I think $199 to $899 a ticket. Plus fees:

https://www.ticketmaster.com/promo/fxqil5

Go big or go home, I guess.

C'mon I don't think it would be out of character for Taylor to sell VIP packages but also want to make sure there was no dynamic pricing for the lower priced tickets. I don't think having the former necessarily means she'd be fine with the later. She's smart and savvy, I'm sure she saw the blowback Springsteen got for it and hoped to avoid it.

Maybe! Springsteen got blowback, but he still sold out the tour, and never said a word about it publicly, let alone reversed his position. I think it's here to stay, and in fact has been in effect for a couple of years already. If anything, if Taylor Swift went out of her way not to have dynamic pricing her people would probably have said something about it.

Yeah, if anything I'm wondering if it's just going to end up another thing Ticketmaster forces on the artists. "Oh, you don't like dynamic pricing? Good luck with all those other venues!"

Someone in my office posted on Slack, for those buying tickets (which doesn't include me): "Use your phone/cellular, and not our work Wifi, or else everyone will get flagged by Ticketmaster for being on the same network... they’ll boot you out of the queue because you’ll be flagged as a potential bot"

So word to the wise, I guess.

Everything I have ever heard about this stuff is that Ticketmaster in a sense exists to take the heat off artists. The number one reason ticket prices are high is because artists ok higher prices, to make more money. If they wanted prices to be lower, prices would be lower; we can thank the Eagles for recognizing there's a lot more money to be wrung out of fans. At the same time, a big stage spectacular like Taylor Swift puts on costs a lot of money, so I have no idea what the minimum ticket price would be for her to even break even, let alone make hundreds of millions of dollars.

The number one reason ticket prices are high is because artists ok higher prices

That.... seems to be really at odds with statements from artists recently about the difficulties of touring right now precisely BECAUSE they don't want to raise tickets. I mean obviously the Taylor Swifts of the world operate at an entirely different level, but I think putting most of the blame on high ticket prices on the artists is disingenuous at best.

Josh is correct. If supply is low and demand is high, fans will scalp these tickets at absurdly high prices in the secondary market no matter what. So artists have to decide whether they keep the scalping money themselves (through Ticketmaster reselling, VIP meet-and-greet packages and dynamic pricing etc. etc.) or keep them artificially low (through something like Verified Fan). Bruce and Taylor made their decisions (which is probably why neither of them are talking about any of this). Those TM fees are usually split between TM and the venue once the artists take their gigantic % (at this level, usually 90-95, or Jimmy Buffett's famous 105) of the base ticket sales.

I mean, undoubtedly true with some artists. I just push back at the blanket statement of, "ticket prices are high because artists ok higher prices".

This was pretty interesting:

https://www.npr.org/2022/08/31/1120252212/does-ticketmaster-have-a-monopoly-on-live-events

Pretty early on, the first guest (CFO of Live Nation Joe Berchtold, so grain of salt, I guess) insists the ticket prices are set by artists, and Ticketmaster executes what the artist wants to do. Ticketmaster et al. are of course making money on top of the ticket price (hence the fees), but that base ticket price is set by the act and their people.

But who knows, supposedly even Pearl Jam had dynamic pricing for their most recent tour so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

(And yeah, we're mostly talking about the expensive tickets being charged by those top acts.)

Artists with leverage definitely set their own prices. There's 0 chance Taylor and Bruce were surprised by the dynamic-pricing and resale shenanigans. Artists who play smaller clubs who could easily be replaced (business-wise) by others who can draw the same or better crowds have no leverage and therefore have less clout to negotiate things like low ticket prices or Ticketmaster fees.

lmao what a clusterfuck

Due to extraordinarily high demands on ticketing systems and insufficient remaining ticket inventory to meet that demand, tomorrow's public on-sale for Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour has been cancelled.

— Ticketmaster (@Ticketmaster) November 17, 2022

Is that the real Ticketmaster account? lol

That's so fucked up. I wonder what percentage of tix from the "presale" went to fans.

that you had to ask if that's the real Ticketmaster is really lol @ Twitter jeez

Taylor should circumvent Ticketmaster and tour farmers markets with Neil Young.

Holy fuck, that is really fucked up.

They're going to have to invent a new category of venue larger than football stadiums to accommodate her future tours.

i guess because of the amount of tickets on "secondary markets" that it's too late for Taylor to be like "i'm refunding everyone and starting all over again" huh

I'm really curious to know what she will, or even can, do. Announce another whole tour? Extend a whole new leg? Doesn't seem like enough gaps in the dates to add that many shows in between stops.

I predict she won't do shit. And that includes marshaling her "army" to help take down Ticketmaster.

Josh you seem really cynical and bitter towards her. I mean, she may not always have the best answer, but it seems like she has a decent track record of at least trying to apologize to her fans for problems.

Cynical for sure! If she wanted to make a difference she probably could, though as those that tried before her discovered it would come at great expense and inconvenience. But bitter? Nah, fans have no right to see her live and she has no obligation to do anything for them. Economically speaking, this outcome makes total sense. I'm strictly armchair in this brouhaha. I just find it gross.

I don’t get why so many people want to see her live in the first place. I would say I’m a moderate to serious fan of her music, depending on the album… but it’s not like her singing or musicianship are the focus of the appeal, at least for me (it’s the songwriting/recording). I’ve never particularly enjoyed seeing her perform on TV or whatever.

Last night, out of boredom/curiosity, I turned on the Reputation tour doc… and had to turn it right off, it was so not my thing (and Reputation is probably my second-favorite album of hers).

I guess you have to be a true “fan,” in every respect, to want to see her do her thing onstage… and all these people are!

xp - Even looking at it solely from the cynical/economic standpoint, even just adding more shows sense, no?

Iirc that's what Garth Brooks did/does. He just keeps adding shows until he sates demand. But I don't think it's as easy to do that (relatively speaking) when you have a huge state of the art touring spectacular like a lot of pop stars have.

xxp Yeah I saw her once, on the Speak Now tour, and it was fun, she was fine. But live performance is never going to be her strongest suit. Lots of forced, on-the-nose between songs patter etc. (I actually got a free media pass for that tour, I wonder if they even bother with those any more.)

The real scoop is that "Mean" is actually about Josh In Chicago.

Can't remember where I saw it, but someone did some math on the alleged demand numbers Ticketmaster was pushing, the stadium capacities and calendar and apparently she'd have to perform nightly for like two and a half years to meet the demand.

Lol, yeah, exactly, she can only play so much!

I've seen her twice, the first on the Speak Now tour (where iirc she was still kind of in aw shucks, pre-supermodel strut mode, and she had a fake front porch set with someone feeding a stuffed goat) and the second part of a big radio station obligation holiday thing (where I was standing next to her mom). The vibe was definitely pretty different between the two. The holiday show reminded me of any number of huge pop star show, so if that's what you're into, that's what you're gonna get.

Sure this was going to end in tears for some anyway, given the demand, but that still doesn't excuse Ticketmaster fucking things up royally.

otm

taylor swift's family has been part of america's ruling class, why not be cynical?

Josh said that to her mom, she she elbowed him in the solar plexus (Taylor was performing "Our Song" at that moment).

ehhhh: https://instagram.com/stories/taylorswift/2974356694747521845?utm_source=ig_story_item_share&igshid=Zjc2ZTc4Nzk=