Many of us Taylor Swift fans thought the The Eras Tour Ticketmaster disaster wouldn’t go beyond the U.S., but those “Swifties” trying to get tickets in Paris and Lyon experienced the chaos this morning. Personally, I was one of those Swifties who woke up at 3 a.m. ET hoping to use my access code and finally get tickets. As I saw many tweeting about the login issue after getting through the queue, I no longer had my hopes up. Now, ticket sales for both Paris and Lyon have been put on hold. It turns out, those countries not using Ticketmaster are having a much smoother process and fans are quite happy with the result.
Syracuse University Law Professor Shubha Ghosh, who specializes in antitrust law, shared his thoughts on Ticketmaster. If you’d like to speak with Professor Ghosh on this issue, please email Vanessa Marquette, Media Relations Specialist, at vrmarque@syr.edu to schedule an interview. He writes:
Shubha Ghosh
“Ticketmaster is a poorly run company and its bad practices come in part from its position as a monopolist in the space of concert ticket distribution … Some of Ticketmaster’s bad choices stem from an understandable concern with ticket counterfeiting – which is confounded by its overbooking in order to ensure capacity for the promoters. Perhaps antitrust intervention on the monopoly side could help, but monopolies are hard to avoid for these intermediaries, or perhaps consumer protection intervention.”
