Taylor Swift fans have ‘Bad Blood’ over Ticketmaster fiasco

After Swifties weren’t able to purchase “presale” tickets for Taylor Swift’s “Eras Tour” due to Ticketmaster’s website crashing, Senator Amy Klobuchar voiced “serious concerns” over the company in an open letter to its CEO.

“When Ticketmaster merged with Live Nation in 2010, it was subject to an anti-trust consent
decree that prohibited it from abusing its market position,” Klobuchar wrote. “Nonetheless, there have been numerous complaints about your company’s compliance with that decree. I am concerned about
a pattern of non-compliance with your legal obligations.”

This is Swift’s first tour since 2018, following the record-breaking success of her newest album, “Midnights.” Swift became the first artist to lock up every one of the top 10 slots on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, all with songs from the recently-released album.

After Klobuchar’s letter and the Tennessee Attorney General’s announcement to investigate the company, Ticketmaster has canceled its plan to sell tickets to Taylor Swift’s latest tour, which were set to go up for sale Friday.

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“Due to extraordinarily high demands on ticketing systems and insufficient remaining ticket inventory to meet that demand,” Ticketmaster wrote in a social media announcement Thursday. “Tomorrow’s public on-sale for Taylor Swift The Eras Tour has been canceled.”

Spike O’Neill, filling in for John Curley, and Shari Elliker weighed in on the snowballing situation.

“Less people applied for student loan relief then went online trying to get Taylor Swift tickets,” Spike said. “And it takes something like this to get the government off of its haunches to look at protecting the consumers. I mean, people can go into student loan debt because of these predatory lending practices, these ridiculous loan agreements that students take on to get their education. And that’s all well and good, but God forbid Swifties can’t get in to see Taylor Swift.”

“I think it’s kind of a tricky thing here when the government gets involved in private businesses, and so you don’t want to have any overstepping by the government because of the fact that there’s this incredibly popular performer, and it’s what the market will bear, right?” Shari asked. “I mean, if you can afford to go see Taylor Swift and the tickets cost, with all this BS or whatever, $500 and you can do it, that’s okay. You can’t, you can’t.”

Listen to the rest of their discussion below:

Listen to John Curley and Shari Elliker weekday afternoons from 3 – 7 p.m. on KIRO Newsradio, 97.3 FM. Subscribe to the podcast here.

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