The Great Ticket War: How Ticketmaster Is Ruining Our Lives
By Features Editor Chloe Barrett
The year is 2023, and it is stagnant in each and every way, except for one important announcement: your favourite artist is playing a show in Ireland! Our little island that is sometimes overlooked by the uber-famous has ‘Dublin, Ireland’ written in tiny script on their tour announcement poster, and the rush of dopamine that races through you is sometimes greater than the actual concert itself. But, as you recollect yourself for a moment and attempt to gather any remaining wits, you realize what this whole occurrence has been leading to: war. Now, I am not talking about burrowing down in trenches with your dear comrades, but something far worse. You will have to purchase your ticket through Ticketmaster.
The leading, and oftentimes the only, seller of popular tickets in Ireland has marred the lives of many in this country, and people rarely have a notably good thing to say about the provider. I am going to be quirky and use both Coldplay’s “Music of The Spheres” and Taylor Swift’s “The Eras Tour” as an example, as the two of them blew good old Irish Twitter up multiple times throughout our sweltering cruel summer. Tis’ the damn season, after all.
As Ms Swift’s concert sale was a bit more complicated, I shall start with an example of a typical sale, such as what Coldplay went through. With two dates officially announced, links to sign up for presale were posted, with the general sale at the end of the week. Pretty standard procedure. Ticketmaster, however, did not seem to budget this nation’s desire for Chris Martin incredibly well. Instead of limiting how many codes went out for the initial presale, they decided to send one to every single person who applied. Now, you must be thinking “How many people could have possibly gone to the effort of signing up?” Oh, you know, only a couple of hundred thousand. It was chaos. Irish Twitter had erupted in fury. Some were being placed at ridiculous numbers such as 150,000 in the queue, while in normal Ticketmaster fashion, many got kicked out and had to join back in, losing their place in the process. Now, there had been rumours about them playing additional nights in Croke Park, and with this demand, it was almost a guarantee. So, I set about refreshing the Coldplay Twitter account waiting for the inevitable announcements. I had tabs open on my phone and on my iPad, using two different Ticketmaster accounts so I would not be kicked out. To be fair, I was quite speedy when those two fresh dates popped up and went on sale. Only a couple of thousand behind in the queue, and I got through their dastardly system. But hold your applause, please. As I chose my tickets and went to purchase them, which I have never had an issue with before, I was kicked out. This did not happen once, oh no. It happened five separate times. I had spent five and a half hours trying to get tickets to see a British man who sings songs that probably make your mother teary-eyed. Don’t get me wrong, I know at least five of their songs, and their concerts are consistently branded as some of the best live gigs out there. All I wanted to see Gwyneth Paltrow’s ex-husband sing his little English heart out.
Throughout this unprecedented demand, Ticketmaster scrambled and allocated a surplus of tickets for the four dates on this first presale. I thought to myself, no need to worry, there is another presale tomorrow! I had already signed up and anxiously waited to get an email from MCD with a link to see those dapper gents. The following morning, I rose early and returned to Ticketmaster’s “Waiting Room”, and from there, the queue. I was vibrating with both nerves and excitement, as for one of the dates I was placed under a thousand in the queue. This was it, surely. My other queues of 20,000 slowly ticked by, but I had no sight of them. The prize was within reach, and all I had to do was grab it. Turns out, because they sold too many presale tickets the day before, only a handful were available, and they were already gone. The internet was raging. People were throwing their laptops on the floor, punching their walls in a blind fury powered purely by the fact that they might not have the opportunity to gaze into Chris Martin’s piercingly blue eyes. Skip forward to the next few days, which consisted of listening to Coldplay’s saddest tunes on repeat, the general sale it was. With tens of thousands of tickets up for grabs, it was a free-for-all. The entire island was in a battle as your mammy clutched her rosary beads, praying for a chance to attend. Once again, they oversold the presale.
Moving on swiftly, in order to win the arguably great war against the many bots that swarm the internet, Ticketmaster decided to adopt a new system for Taylor’s tickets. You simply inputted your email address and signed up in order to be in for a chance of winning the esteemed opportunity to purchase tickets. Was that a lengthy mouthful and incredibly confusing to read? If you asked the thousands of users who tweeting their panicked queries in vast quantities and into the void, they would have replied with an astounding ‘YES!’. It was a complicated process that baffled many. As a result, to attend the concert, you not only had to be lucky enough to be randomly selected for a chance at buying tickets, but you also had to have been blessed on the day of the ticket sale. This excluded many people and essentially locked them out of getting any tickets, myself included. The codes that were sent to the chosen ones were non-transferable and locked to the specific account registered under the original email address. Those desperate enough did get scammed as a result, due to some people selling their codes online. Long story short, despite signing up multiple times, neither I nor my friends were chosen, we were all shelved and put on a waitlist. We were banished, and it felt just as personal as Ms. Swift obtaining a restraining order against us. One of my accounts did not even have the privilege of being placed on the waitlist, it was simply lost somewhere in Ticketmaster’s void, never to be found again. A moment of silence if you please.
The idea of this overly complicated process was to ensure that legitimate fans could grab tickets, and not some pesky resellers that would scalp what they could in order to later sell them on some dodgy third-party website. It was an online version of The Hunger Games and the tense race to the cornucopia in the middle. Despite the valiant efforts that Ticketmaster put in place, some tickets soon went up for sale at over ten times the original price. Many fans later took to the internet to complain in droves, and even offered a far better solution: using listener statistics! It’s a case of would’ve, could’ve, should’ve as of now as the time has passed, but as I am sure you are aware, Spotify and Apple Music track how often you listen to certain artists, and as a result, sometimes you are offered the chance to buy a “limited edition” piece of merchandise as a result. If this was implemented, many thought that the ticket sale would be a lot fairer and less of a downright blood bath, which is always a nice thing.
Of course, the usual issues that Ticketmaster is a recurring offender of did end up happening. Many lost their places in the queuing system and were booted off the website completely, effectively losing their only chance to buy tickets. The website crashed for others, and some could not even access the sale to begin with. Other fans got through to the purchasing page only to find out that the Irish ticket prices had been massively hiked up in comparison to all of the other countries in Europe (not even including the pesky fees that they later tack on) and could not afford them as a result. American Taylor Swift fans actually brought a lawsuit against Ticketmaster over in the States as a response to all of the aforementioned issues and even more, so maybe the Americans got one thing right.
Overall, there are obvious improvements that inevitably must be made to the ticket industry, and that is not distinct to just Ireland either, but the entire monopoly. Who knows, maybe a Ticketmaster CEO might stumble across this little article and take my suggestions to heart. Although there is probably a better chance of Chris Martin popping down to Cork and serenading me personally with a rendition of “Paradise”. A girl can dream.
