What Ticketmaster Did

The 2022 Ticketmaster controversy, also known as the Ticketmaster-Taylor Swift fiasco in the mainstream media, refers to a public controversy in November 2022 over the blunders of American ticket sales company Ticketmaster in selling tickets to the Eras Tour, the 2023 concert tour by American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift.

Ticketmaster, the leading ticketing platform in the world, partnered with Swift to sell tickets to the tour. The first round of ticket on-sale for the U.S. leg began on November 18 via Ticketmaster's Verified Fan pre-sale program. Media outlets described the demand for tickets to the Eras Tour as "astronomical", with 3.5 million people registering for the program. However, within an hour of commencing, the pre-sale website crashed, with users either completely logged out or in a frozen queue. 2.4 million tickets were sold that day despite the outage, breaking the all-time record for the most concert tickets sold by an artist in a single day. Ticketmaster attributed the crash to heavy site traffic—"historically unprecedented demand with [14 million] showing up"—but users blamed poor customer service. Live Nation Entertainment, the owner of Ticketmaster, explained that Swift's "staggering" demand "overwhelmed" the website beyond its capacity. Ticketmaster eventually canceled the general on-sale due to "insufficient" inventory. Swift stated that she was promised by the company that they could handle the demand. Ticketmaster apologized to Swift and her fans via social media. A large number of tickets, however, were seized by scalpers and re-listed on ticket resale websites such as StubHub.

Ticketmaster was met with widespread censure nationwide. Fans and consumer groups called the platform deceitful and alleged that the company is abusing its dominant market position. In response, several members of the U.S. Congress voiced their support to revert the 2010 merger of Ticketmaster and Live Nation,[note 1] which they dubbed a monopoly experiencing no competitive pressure, leading to substandard service and higher prices for consumers. Following investigations initiated by several state attorneys general, the U.S. Department of Justice was reported to have opened a federal probe into the companies. Swift's tour promoter, AEG Presents, said Ticketmaster had exclusive deals with the majority of U.S. live venues, coercing AEG into working with Ticketmaster. In December 2022, fans sued Live Nation-Ticketmaster for intentional deception, fraud, price fixing, violations of antitrust law and various other laws in two different courts. The U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee examined the merger and fiasco with a hearing in January 2023.

Here is an image from Taylor's instagram story addressing what happened.
And also!! Ticketmaster cancelled the general sale, which is unacceptable.

Ticketmaster's general sale cancelling tweet

TLDR: Ticketmaster is an evil monopoly that never should've existed in the first place.