Ticketmaster, the most popular website to buy tickets for all events such as, concerts, sports games, comedy events, etc., has continued to face backlash from thousands of angry fans around the globe after many failed, crashed, and scandal sites which have allowed most fans to claim that Ticketmaster has broken the concert industry as a whole after seeing a continuous pattern of reselling issues, ticket cancellations, website crashing, and continued buffering of queues.
Most users had first begun to attack the website after trying to buy tickets for Taylor Swift’s “The Eras Tour” in 2022 where fans had come face to face with hours of long waited queues, continuous site crashes, canceled sales, scalping (resale), and many problems with the verified fan system—the verified Fan presale saw 3.5 million people register, but the site was overwhelmed by 3.5 billion requests, including massive bot traffic, which had resulted in 3+ hour waits, frozen queues, and, eventually, the cancellation of the general public on-sale.
The verified fan system is essentially a glorified term in which Ticketmaster gets to dictate who “real fans” are by providing a pre registration system which is said to help to block bots and brokers, but in reality it is an excuse to up the prices for tickets as well as creating an unnecessary lottery selection by not guaranteeing those who have pre registered with their own special code for the pre sale. These struggles also come with the fact that after presale is over and the real sale begins, tickets around the event are already doubled in price due to the resellers, as well as being left with the less favored seats, overall creating an even more stressful system.
San Marcos junior Saydee Gaza Fernandez stated, “I think having pre-access codes is unfair because then it leads to most tickets being gone, and then regular sale is just a bunch of people reselling the tickets for a much higher price.”
In November 2025, singer-songwriter Olivia Dean forced a major Ticketmaster concession after public outcry over 2026 tickets for her “The Art Of Loving Tour,” which were then being resold for over 14 times their face value, exceeding $1,000. Dean criticized the industry for their “disgusting”, “vile”, and exploitative service, which allowed for Ticketmaster to cap resale prices at face value and offer partial refunds to the impacted fans. Overall, the situation continued to bring these incidents from Ticketmaster up to the surface, suggesting that the secondary ticket market would only be growing stronger and making live music performances less and less accessible.
In early September of 2025, Ariana Grande’s “Eternal Sunshine” tour began selling tickets for the summer on Ticketmaster, and similarly to Olivia Dean, resellers began to dominate the entirety of the purchasing system, as well as site crashes, and a drive up in pricing. With this, fans took notice of the mass bot activity as well as a lack of official dynamic pricing, allowing the experience to be equally bad despite continuous efforts to better the system. In response, Grande addressed the situation on social media and expressed her frustration with the system while also promising to fight for better access for fans.
Following these events, the Department of Justice has decided to sue the company for all of the ways in which they have dictated the ticketing market for concert goers. The DOJ claims Live Nation-Ticketmaster to be unlawful, use anticompetitive conduct, as well as being an illegal monopoly in order to have overall control over the live entertainment and ticketing industries; allowing for a limit of competition from all other competitors and allowing them to drive up ticket pricing, especially with the fact that Ticketmaster is said to have control over 70% of major concert sales due to Live Nation/Ticketmaster running the management of 400 musical artists and 265 venues around North America. With that, the DOJ is fighting to make purchasing tickets fair, well-priced, and an overall less stressful process.
This court case is said to continue over the next six weeks until there is a final say in who has won over this issue, but for now, we must hope that there will be a better experience of purchasing tickets that will allow for future experiences of live events to be all the more accessible.
