The FTC’s Taylor Swift Tickets Lawsuit Ignores the Real Culprit

Ticketmaster’s near-monopoly has been a cause for concern within the industry for years.

Here’s a piece of free advice: don’t get a Gen-Xer talking about how hard we used to have to work to get concert tickets. Many in the cohort likely have stories of camping out overnight at a stadium box office, calling the order line at the stroke of 8 a.m. until we finally got through, or bribing a friend who worked at the customer service counter of the local grocery store that served as a ticket outlet. It took planning and teamwork. It’s not like today, where you can just easily do it at the click of a button on your phone, we’ll tell anyone who listens.

Except for many shows, it’s not quite so simple. Those who stopped going to high-profile concerts in the early days of online ordering may not realize what an absolute nightmare the process has become. It was most readily evident in the disastrous on-sale launch for Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, which crashed the servers of Ticketmaster. The company is responsible for ticketing and distribution for Swift’s shows (and that of every act, big and small).

The fallout from that fiasco and for other mega-acts such as Bruce Springsteen and Olivia Rodrigo culminated in a lawsuit filed Monday by the Federal Trade Commission. The defendants are Key Investment Group and its affiliated ticket resale companies, including Epic Seats and Totally Tix LLC, which the government alleges violated existing laws to bulk-buy high-demand tickets and resell them, at a markup, on the secondary market.

The FTC’s case is worth pursuing, of course — the actions of such cultural predators, and the methods by which they exploit both artists and the fans clamoring to see them should have consequences. But it’s also a wholly inefficient method of addressing the ongoing dumpster fire of online ticketing, a hotbed of bad decisions and inevitable outcomes that dates back to one of the most ill-advised mergers in recent memory.

We’re talking, of course, about the 2010 merger of Ticketmaster with Live Nation, which had, up to that point been Ticketmaster’s closest thing to competition. It was never really an even playing field; Ticketmaster’s near-monopoly on live event ticket sales had been a cause for concern within the industry for years. Most notably, at the height of their mid-‘90s fame, Pearl Jam launched a public attack against the company, particularly its egregious (and hidden) service fees, as well as its exclusivity agreements with major venues. It resulted in some bad press for Ticketmaster, but no meaningful change to its policies or dominance.

Other artists have attempted their own solutions, with limited success. In 2012, Louis C.K. sidestepped Ticketmaster and sold tickets to his 39-city US tour directly to fans through his website, though as a stand-up comedian, his production and venue requirements were considerably less demanding than those of a major musical act. (He has since resumed using the problematic platform.) 

More recently, Chappell Roan sold tickets to her fall mini-tour using a process called Fair AXS, which aims to eliminate bots and scalpers, while Billie Eilish experimented with “untransferable” tickets, which would eliminate the possibility of resale. (Neither effort fully solved the problem: tickets to both immediately appeared — at a hefty mark-up — on resale sites such as Vivid Seats, SeatGeek and StubHub.)

When Ticketmaster and Live Nation merged a decade and a half ago, they essentially became the only choice for artists booking shows in nearly every venue of note, in every major American city. Within that framework, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that companies like those named in the FTC suit figured out how to use Ticketmaster’s market control for their own financial gain. They’ve succeeded by using bots and large numbers of fake Ticketmaster accounts to bypass its per-customer ticket caps. These tickets are then resold on secondary marketplaces, often at inflated prices.

The scheme is blatantly unethical and illegal, yes. But it thrives — fueled by the old rule of supply and demand. For decades, Ticketmaster muscled out rivals, rigging the game along the way. Now the FTC is left playing whack-a-mole with resellers who have figured out how to rig things for themselves. But it won’t address the real issue.

Artists like Swift, Springsteen and Rodrigo can’t even contemplate the pros and cons of multiple services when choosing how to sell tickets to their tours. They have no choice but to use Ticketmaster, despite its ongoing and demonstrable inability to impose basic security measures and achieve its singular goal of selling tickets to fans. 

This is not how capitalism should work — it’s supposed to allow competition and let the market choose the better service.

There is only one real solution: to break up this monopoly. The Department of Justice began pursuing a case last year, but that kind of extensive antitrust action takes years, filled with time-consuming appeals and arguments. In the meantime, Ticketmaster will remain both inefficient and unavoidable; its software will continue to be hacked and crash, and small, facile attempts (like this FTC suit) will achieve nothing. It’s like applying Band-Aids to a missing limb.