The Summer of Impossible Concert Tickets to Get: From Bey Hive to Swifties

Live music has been part of our entertainment repertoire since the creation of instruments. No matter what genre of music you listen to, there’s no better feeling than seeing your favourite band or artist play right in front of you.

And there are some musicians who have a lot more demand than others. There have been two of the most popular artists in the world go on tour in 2023 – Beyonce and Taylor Swift. They’ve travelled all over the world and played to millions of fans.

However, seeing your favourite act could set you back a few pennies. These huge productions are notoriously expensive to put on – and very expensive to witness yourself.

Beyonce’s Renaissance tour crossed the entire globe and is even predicted to have been the cause to inflation rises in certain cities. This should come as no surprise as a ticket would cost you between $91 and $5,000 US dollars.

And it’s not just the prices that were the issue, the real problem lies with just being able to access the site on which they were sold. You have better chances betting on the Saints to win the Super Bowl than scoring tickets, but it’s always worth a try.

What happened between Taylor Swift and Ticketmaster?

Way back in November 2022 when the tickets for Taylor Swift’s highly anticipated tour went on sale, there was a huge issue when it came to people purchasing tickets. Due to this being her first tour in a number of years, competition for tickets was fierce.

Not only had Taylor Swift not toured in years, but she had also recorded and released multiple albums over a short period of time. This meant that there were even more people wanting to go to her new tour.

Due to the unforeseen number of people trying to get onto the site, Ticketmaster ended up cancelling the date that the tickets went on sale to the public. They said that they had insufficient ticket inventory to meet the insanely high demand.

But this didn’t go down well with the fans. A group of them got together and planned to sue Ticketmaster and the parent company Live Nation. The grounds on which they were suing was ‘fraud, price-fixing and antitrust violations’.

There is some confusion into how this situation escalated in the first place. Before the tickets were released to the public, there was a Verified Fan programme put in place. This was meant to help find any bots that might have been mimicking humans in order to place huge orders of tickets to be touted.

The way they do this is by getting people to disclose their information ahead of time including which places they would be buying tickets for. These people were then supposed to be sent a code which would lead them to be able to access the tickets.

However, this didn’t go to plan. There was absolute chaos on the site – fans hadn’t been sent their codes even though they had already signed up. The entire site was flooded with bots that managed to get a hold of millions of tickets before actual fans were able to.

Within hours of the tickets going on sale, tickets were being resold at astronomical prices. The tickets were originally priced between $49 and $449 US dollars. However, when the touts go hold of them, tickets were being sold for up to $22,000 US dollars.

The debacle ended up with Taylor herself apologising to the fans for what they had to go through to get tickets. Ticketmaster speedily issued their own apology, but it wasn’t enough to deter the US justice department from conducting an antitrust investigation.

Is ticket touting on the rise?

With all the technology available to us, it comes as a surprise that there could still be so many issues with ticket touting. It used to just be some people outside the venue trying to flog spare tickets to passersby. However, now that there is more advanced technology, the ticket touters can be a lot sneakier.

Ticket touting is when someone buys tickets for an event with no intention of going themselves. They will then sell on those tickets for a much higher price in order to make a profit.

Not only does this create issues for the people buying the tickets, but it ends up with the artist suffering as well as we saw with Taylor Swift. Artists are often seen to have more control over these situations than might actually be the case. This ends up with them having to get more involved in order to resolve the situation.

Hopefully we can see a decline in ticket touting as time goes on and more artists speak out against the issue.