Document Type
Note
Abstract
On November 1, 2022, Taylor Swift first announced The Eras Tour. The pent-up demand for a Taylor Swift concert was massive: she had not toured since the Reputation Stadium Tour in 2018, the Lover Fest Tour set for 2020 was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and her streaming numbers and popularity were higher than ever. The Eras Tour announcement stated that Ticketmaster would be the sole ticketing platform, and 3.5 million fans, known as “Swifties,” registered for a chance to purchase tickets. When presale opened on November 15, 2022, disaster struck for millions of fans. Swifties were met with around six hours of delays, high prices, numerous website crashes, and glitches that made it nearly impossible to purchase tickets. These devastating technical issues, combined with astronomical demand, forced Ticketmaster to cancel general sales. This left millions of people unable to purchase tickets through the official marketplace, relegating them to resale sites such as StubHub and SeatGeek, where prices were often tens of thousands of dollars above face value. Ticketmaster blamed the issues on unprecedented demand, claiming that there were 14 million more people on the website than expected, and “3.5 billion system requests” that consisted of “four times its previous peak.” However, fans, and even Swift herself, were dissatisfied with Ticketmaster’s excuses and loudly voiced their opposition to the company’s policies. The scale of the event became so large that lawmakers such as Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and David N. Cicilline began to call for an investigation into Ticketmaster’s monopolistic tendencies.
Although the Ticketmaster–Live Nation merger had been determined not to violate Section 7 of the Clayton Act, the Eras Tour presale issues, as well as the reactions by lawmaking officials, exemplify that there may have been something amiss. In approving the merger, the government essentially signed off on an agreement that eliminated what could have been a spirited competition between two companies in the entertainment ticketing industry and, instead, created one massive company to the detriment of consumers and the overall ticketing market. The ticketing industry is far from the only industry that has experienced antitrust scrutiny, but other industries seem to be subject to more stringent standards. For example, the airline industry has managed to exist as an oligopoly for decades. Despite numerous attempts—both successful and unsuccessful—to merge, there remains a healthy amount of competition between the largest United States carriers. How is it that antitrust scrutiny in the airline industry force that market to maintain a substantial amount of competition, whereas the same laws applied to the entertainment industry created a monopoly?
Recommended Citation
Margaret Bibby,
The Last Great American Dynasties: Lessons in Monopoly Prevention from Mergers in Entertainment and Aviation,
51
J. Legis.
359
(2025).
Available at:
https://scholarship.law.nd.edu/jleg/vol51/iss2/7