The dreaded “10,000+ people ahead of you” in a TicketMaster queue is practically a death sentence for fans trying to acquire tickets to see their favorite band.
TicketMaster is a greedy monopoly that consumers want burned and demolished as soon as possible. However, it is often disguised as an American ticket sales distribution company in California.
For years, fans have been suffering at the hands of this large company, facing problems such as hidden fees, the verified fan system and bot attacks. According to The Atlantic, fans even end up paying an additional 60 to 70 percent more money for service fees on top of their actual ticket.
One of the most well known dilemmas that fans faced was getting tickets for Taylor Swift’s, “The Era’s Tour.” This tour was singer-songwriter Taylor Swift’s sixth tour in five years. Of course, Ticketmaster ensured Swift and her team that they could handle it. However, they were mistaken.
When tickets went on sale, the site experienced a bot attack, which caused the site to glitch and shut down for hours, causing thousands of people to stay stuck in a paused queue. When fans were finally able to purchase tickets, no tickets were available and quickly appeared on scalping websites for thousands of dollars.
On Nov. 18, Swift posted to her Instagram story, “There are a multitude of reasons why people had such a hard time trying to get tickets and I’m trying to figure out how this situation can be improved moving forward. I’m not going to make excuses for anyone because we asked them, multiple times, if they could handle this kind of demand and we were assured they could.”
From a different perspective, another artist that has had some strong words publicly for TicketMaster is country music superstar Zach Bryan. Bryan wants his fans to be able to see his shows “without paying $450 a ticket.” The artist wants the working class to be able to afford a ticket to see his show, and rightfully so. The artist has become so fed up with TicketMaster that he took to Twitter to publicly state his disgust with the popular ticket app.
“I have met kids at my shows who have paid upwards of four hundred and fifty bucks to be there and I’m done with it,” Bryan tweeted. “I’ve decided to play a limited number of headline shows next year to which I’ve done all I can to make prices as cheap as possible and to prove to people tickets don’t have to cost $450 to see a good and honest show.”
Bryan then went further with the matter and released a live album titled “All My Homies Hate TicketMaster,” containing his performance from the iconic venue of Red Rocks in Colorado. It was at this moment Bryan became a superstar in the country music industry when he quite literally had 10,000 people at this venue screaming every word to his songs in a snowstorm that lasted an hour and a half.
All in all, artists with such large magnitude such as Bryan are speaking out against TicketMaster and their, for lack of a better term, garbage policies regarding ticket sales. Their words are certainly reaching their fanbase, as many music fans around the world are boycotting TicketMaster as a whole.