Ticketmaster is often the subject of ire for one reason or another, like earlier this year, when “dynamic pricing” for Oasis reunion tour tickets got the attention of the UK government. It turns out that Taylor Swift flat-out refused to go with the dynamic pricing model for The Eras Tour.
In an interview with HITS Daily Double, Jay Marciano, AEG Presents Chairman and CEO, was asked about what he learned from The Eras Tour, and he said, “There are a number of things Taylor did that other artists wouldn’t contemplate doing. One is, she had an opportunity to dynamically price her tickets, and she didn’t want to do that to her fans. She specifically said, ‘No dynamic pricing.’ She was willing to make decisions that potentially cut into her income because she was taking a long-term view of her career.”
While this situation went down behind closed doors, Swift has publicly shared her thoughts about Ticketmaster, specifically about the platform’s issues with the tour and how difficult the ticket-buying process ended up being. She wrote in 2022:
“Well. It goes without saying that I’m extremely protective of my fans. […] It’s really difficult for me to trust an outside entity with these relationships and loyalties, and excruciating for me to just watch mistakes happen with no recourse. There are a multitude of reasons why people had such a hard time trying to get tickets and I’m trying to figure out how this situation can be improved moving forward. I’m not going to make excuses for anyone because we asked them, multiple times, if they could handle this kind of demand and we were assured they could. It’s truly amazing that 2.4 million people got tickets, but it really pisses me off that a lot of them feel like they went through several bear attacks to get them.”