Thread by @future_of_music

Okay, so Ticketmaster's website is down right now, presumably due to demand for Taylor Swift tix. Here's a quick thread about some reasons this is such a nightmare. #breakupticketmaster

First, public service announcement, just because we want to help Swifties have an easier time today, if possible.

https://twitter.com/TMFanSupport/status/1592532866306609152

In a healthy marketplace, artists with high-profile tours would have the ability to choose from a whole range of different ticketing partners with technical capacities to withstand an onslaught of demand, and could choose the one that best fits their needs and their fans' needs.

In reality, most artists have limited agency over the ticketing process as @iamjohnoliver has helpfully pointed out.

https://twitter.com/iamjohnoliver/status/1503388757659197446

When Ticketmaster has so much of the primary ticket marketplace locked down, massive resources, and tons of platform integrations, it's hard for would-be competitors to mount a serious challenge & develop the technological capacities necessary to do a better job.

That level of simultaneous demand presents technological challenges that can only be met with innovation and investment. And it's hard to generate sufficient investment in markets where monopolies exist.

Ticketmaster's integration across markets means that artists who work with Live Nation venues, promotions, and/or management might not even have the choice to go with a different provider if they wanted to.

That's one reason to #breakupticketmaster (and you can write a letter to the Department of Justice encouraging them to unwind TM's merger with LiveNation at breakupticketmaster.com

But it's important to understand that Ticketmaster isn't the only source of dysfunction. Another problem stems from secondary companies and brokers. The worst of these use automated bots to buy tickets for resale at inflated prices with even more jacked up fees.

Artists want tickets to go to real fans, as much as possible. They typically want to avoid tickets going to the third-party reseller sites and brokers, which jack up prices and none of the extra money makes it to artists and their teams.

Much of the technological innovation and investment in the ticketing marketplace that ought to be spent making the process easier and smoother for fans--ends up being spent on technological innovation to fight off bots through security measures.

Ticketbuyers end up having to navigate a confusing labyrinth of programs and pre-registrations and hoops to jump through--and they're still not guaranteed a seat.

Resellers and brokers respond with their own technologies and strategies, investing in resources and tools that allow them to get tickets before fans do, and then charging those fans more for profit. It creates a technological arms race that's bad for artists and fans alike.

At times, the chaos caused by secondary companies and brokers in turn gives Ticketmaster cover to pile on more dysfunction and potentially frustrating practices. That's what drives massively marked up seats available through "Platinum seats," for example.

Ticketmaster is itself an increasingly large presence in the resale market, replicating many of the same problems of other resellers--including for events independent venues where they don't run the primary ticketing. They pile on even more fees.

There's no silver bullet solution--we need to address the structural problems in the market, but we also need clear rules of the road that apply to every company.

Unfortunately, the secondary companies and brokers sometimes try to take advantage of everyone's frustration with Ticketmaster to advance their own unrelated policy agenda, like banning resale restrictions or paperless ticketing.

It'd be very hard to look at the situation today and conclude that the most serious problem is that it's too difficult for ticketbuyers to resell their ticket!

That John Oliver video mentions one potential path forward--Pearl Jam worked with Ticketmaster to create a fan-to-fan exchange program that allows fans to sell to other fans, at face value without any additional fees. That's a good outcome.

And that tells us something important about the path forward. To come up with successful solutions, we should listen closely to artists themselves--ideally, lots of different artists at different stages of their careers.

We should also make sure that we're responsive to the needs of independent venues and arts presenters (of varying sizes) at the community level. Much of the discussion of ticketing policy focuses on arenas and stadiums, but it impacts everyone in the field.

In so many ways, artists and fans really are on the same team. We need public policies and regulatory efforts that reflect that.