Ticketmaster's Eras Tour meltdown left millions of fans empty-handed (2022)

What happened

In November 2022, Ticketmaster ran the presale for Taylor Swift's Eras Tour. It said more than 3.5 million people pre-registered — which it called the largest registration in its history — and roughly 1.5 million were sent codes to buy tickets for the 52 dates.

The system buckled. Fans faced hours-long queues, repeated site crashes, and being thrown back to the end of virtual lines with thousands ahead of them. Ticketmaster then cancelled the public on-sale entirely, citing insufficient remaining inventory. Millions who wanted tickets were left with nothing — or pushed to resale markets at inflated prices.

Why it became a federal issue

The meltdown crystallized years of complaints about the 2010 Live Nation–Ticketmaster merger. On January 24, 2023, the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing pointedly titled "That's the Ticket: Promoting Competition and Protecting Consumers in Live Entertainment."

Senators from both parties grilled Ticketmaster's CFO, repeatedly characterizing the company as a monopoly and questioning whether the lack of competition had harmed consumers. The hearing helped build the pressure that led, the following year, to the DOJ's antitrust suit to break up the company.

Why it's on file

This is the moment the harm to fans became undeniable and bipartisan: a market so concentrated that the biggest tour in the world couldn't be sold without collapsing, with no real competitor for fans to turn to. See the concert ticketing explainer for the structure behind it.