Taylor Swift, Coldplay and Ticketmaster’s new selling technique: presale anxiety

If the words “presale happening now” enter your life, don’t get excited: the phrase is a recognised stress inducer found on the path to numb disappointment.

“Best availability remains for VIP packages”, in Ticketmaster-speak, means a closely aligned triumvirate of commercial powerhouses – the artist, the concert promoter and Ticketmaster itself – wants to drain your bank account, harvest your organs and auction off your grandmother, otherwise it’s no sale.

Who is to blame? The live entertainment industry would have it that it’s our fault: there are too many of us. No mere sports stadium can fit us all in.

But there is something else going on, too. Baked into the mechanics of the ticketing process, and unfettered by any consumer legislation, there is a lose-lose scenario: either miss out on a ticket or feel grateful to be offered any ticket at all at any price. Nosebleed seats that cost as much as a mortgage payment? The tickets will be released to some other sucker if you blink and hesitate.

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Less than a week apart, fans of Taylor Swift and Coldplay girded their loins and began an assault course of presale registrations, unique code texts, random invitation links, waiting rooms and swollen online queues in the hope of securing tickets to Swift’s hat-trick of Aviva gigs and/or Coldplay’s Dublin foray.

Swifties, appalled by the manner in which Ticketmaster’s handling of the singer’s US tour dates descended into a bot-ridden fiasco, called the ticketing process “The Great War” after a Swift song title, embracing the hyperbole of it.

[ Róisín Ingle: I might be okay, but I’m not fine at all after trying to buy Taylor Swift tickets ]

But while pent-up, post-pandemic demand for Swift’s Eras tour dates was always destined to result in Swifties wailing in their bedrooms about the unfairness of it all – and that was just the adults – the mass frustration that erupted this week during two Coldplay presales was a surprise.

Even the people participating in them, who presumably had a more accurate sense of Coldplay’s popularity than those who didn’t, seemed taken aback to find themselves stuck in the Ticketmaster trenches with tens of thousands of others, their fear of missing out crystallising hours later into confirmation that they definitely had.

Error messages abounded, eliciting a blunt reply from Ticketmaster that everything was “in working order”, the site had not crashed and something had gone wrong at the users’ end. As two nights in Croke Park doubled to four, the Irish Daily Star dubbed it a “Cold Rush”, hinting at the money-spinning dimension to proceedings.

The live entertainment industry has so many of us where they want us – in the throng of a vast crowd, glowing wristbands aloft, or else wishing we were there

Coldplay, because they have “reasonable chaps” embedded in their image, have said they will sell pairs of €20 tickets to these gigs at a later date. The quantity of these “Infinity Tickets” will, however, be “limited”.

To be fair to Ticketmaster, a company with all the charm of one that knows it has a virtual monopoly, I laughed when I read that. But those are not the prices that stand out for the band’s Music of the Spheres tour. Some fans were only offered the chance to buy something called the “Ultimate Spheres Experience” costing €987.85 – an astronomical price tag that amazingly managed to put the most expensive Swift ticket, the €743.62 “Karma Is My Boyfriend Package”, into a flattering light.

Coldplay has also been shifting “Platinum Tickets”, which offer no extras but were being flogged for about €300 this week thanks to the scourge of dynamic pricing. The official line is that these tickets “give fans safe and fair access to some of the most in-demand tickets in the house at market-driven prices”.

Who needs touts? Clearly, Irish anti-tout legislation that banned the sale of tickets above “face value” is utterly meaningless in situations where “face value” can spiral. Indeed, Ticketmaster’s introduction of dynamic pricing in the US market back in 2018 was explicitly advertised as a means to take back business from resellers. Now some artists are opting to use it on their tours here. The message is not just pay up or someone else will, it’s pay up because someone else will.

[ ‘I’m absolutely gutted’: Taylor Swift fans disappointed after failing to secure tickets to Dublin shows ]

I survived the Great War (sorry) and sat out the Battle of Coldplay, so I have no fresh scars here, and yet everything about these presale hooplas, the VIP packages – wisely left on the shelf in some cities – and the use of dynamic pricing makes me queasy. It certainly does nothing to undermine the theory that in the future offline experiences will be a privilege that only the wealthiest will be able to afford.

The industry says this is simply supply and demand and it is not behaving any differently from airlines or hotels. Fine. Gouge just like them if you must. But people don’t stick posters of airlines and hotels on their walls. The connection between artists and fans is not supposed to be as cynical as this.

The concentration of power here has been as self-perpetuating as the hype. Both the Swift and Coldplay tours are promoted in Ireland by MCD, which is now effectively half-owned by Live Nation, the world’s biggest concert promoter. Live Nation also owns Ticketmaster, which it merged with in 2010 in a deal that is recently, belatedly, beginning to fail some high-profile sniff tests. Sadly, useful political interventions remain almost as rare as the tickets.

It feels like it should be a controllable thing: we decide to buy gig tickets and then, some months later, we’ll flash our barcodes on the way in. Pre-presale “tips” and “hacks” promise to help. And yet all the wargaming does is mask the powerlessness of consumers in the face of a market dominance that was permitted to happen. The live entertainment industry has so many of us where they want us – in the throng of a vast crowd, glowing wristbands aloft, or else wishing we were there.