Hey Taylor Swift fans... we know your pain.
Ticketmaster exploded and died under the duress of millions wanted to buy Taylor Swift tickets. BTS ARMY has seen this movie before, can I spoil the ending?
Hey, have you heard this story before? The mafia known as Ticketmaster forced you to run this byzantine cyber-maze, with the end of game of giving them hundreds of dollars to attend a concert.
The site/app will crash, you will be stuck in a line with thousands of people, with your hopes and dreams have a 50-50 shot of ending in flaming failure.
Taylor Swift’s legions of fans left the shaky TM servers in shambles, after millions tried to get tickets for her first tour in five years, with many taking to social media to describe the ordeal.
Ahem.
Yeah, that tale sounds super familiar. That was all of us, like 15 months ago, trying to get BTS tickets for the Los Angeles leg of the Permission to Dance limited concert run. Ticketmaster’s hold on the concert industry, up to 70 percent of all ticketing goes through them, has led to this mess. There is no where else to go to get tickets, en masse, unless you have deep pockets for the resellers or scalpers.
I well remember that whole sequence for the LA dream. I got the presale code in the lottery, signed up for the verified status before the sale, and then jumped into the queue when it was my time. It crashed twice, moving my little person icon running in the middle of the screen from the end of the line….all the way back to the start. Thousands ahead of me, leaving me more side-eyeing and angry than Hobi at dance mistakes.
It seemed useless, but I was determined to see this shitshow to the end. So I put the laptop on the coffee table, and did something else. I did a lot of something elses, coming back to check on my progress, until… like an hour later, I was in.
Time to pick tickets in SoFi Stadium. I was shocked. I picked two tickets, advanced to the next screen….and site crashed.
Refreshed, blank screen. Huh. Refreshed again. I was back. Was I?!
(Wait, that sounds like what happened on Weverse with the Busan livestream…, but I digress.)
I held my breath until I paid, endured the forever to process and then it went through.
And this email came. Now I breathed. Inhale. Exhale.
I technically won the war. (And then utterly lost my mind at SoFi, day 3.)
But even though the system “worked” for me, it was awful. The TM fees, which can be staggering, make the tickets even more expensive. The dynamic pricing feature, which artists like Bruce Springsteen, Harry Styles and Swift employed, is evil. (BTS did NOT do dynamic pricing. Every seat stayed the same price as assigned.) TM takes because it can, and clearly, it’s not a cover fee because they are good at what they do. Invest in some servers and tech and engineers for my 90 bucks per ticket rip-off.
Fine, TM sold two million Swift tickets in one day. But the entire experience was not cool, and all of it needs to be examined.
BTS fans screamed to high heaven about the TM debacle. And crickets.
Not that Swift’s fans are also suffering too, maybe, MAYBE, somebody in Washington will actually do something about this monopoly.
Anyways. Good luck to the Swift fans. Something needs to change for all of us.
👀 This week’s BTS video recco: Jin on Youngji’s show. She didn’t make it out alive. WWH was the master hootch sommelier. (turn on subs for ENG)