Nora Grace-Flood photo
McDonald, Blumenthal, Le and Grayson boosting antitrust bill Monday.
Richmond Le stood outside the Shubert Theater in support of his favorite superstar and her worldwide fans who have both been affected by the bungled concert sales of an under-fire concert-broker — and spoke out in favor of legislation that would break ticket services’ stranglehold over music venues, artists and audiences.
Le, who founded the University of Connecticut’s 300-member Taylor Swift fan club, joined fellow self-proclaimed “Swifties” — including U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal — on Monday in welcoming The Unlock Ticketing Markets Act, a bill introduced by the Senate Judiciary committee in April that aims to prohibit excessively long-term exclusive venue ticketing contracts.
“This Eras tour ought to be a time of joy,” Blumenthal said of the launch of singer-songwriter Taylor Swift’s latest concert series this spring. While he won’t be attending any of her shows, he said, “I’m a fan… I love Taylor Swift!”
Blumenthal: "I love Taylor Swift."
“I felt for the fans that were shut out and shut down” by the “monopolistic mess” that took place in November, Blumenthal said, when mass malfunctions emerged after Ticketmaster, the company estimated to dominate up to 80 percent market share of the ticketing industry, first started selling seats during a presale push for the upcoming tour.
Fans rushing to get tickets were instead stranded online for hours, facing inexplicable secondary fees and bugs that ended with many losing the chance to see the artist live.
The fiasco has since revitalized efforts by politicians like Blumenthal to enact antitrust legislation to avoid anti-competitive practices by companies like Ticketmaster — and to make sure fans aren’t let down once again when Taylor takes her next album on tour.
The Unlock Ticketing Markets Act is the latest way Blumenthal is hoping to protect his fellow Swifties. Many large concert venues, he said, enter into exclusive contracts with Ticketmaster that last as long as ten years, meaning that artists reliant on big arenas to accommodate their massive fan-bases have “no choice but to go to places dominated by Ticketmaster” and are subsequently held hostage to Ticketmaster’s poor business practices.
Read through the bill here. And click here to read Ticketmaster’s extensive November 2022 response to the Eras Tour ticketing breakdown.
“Fans it harms, artists it harms,” he said. “It means exorbitant ticket prices that are only skyrocketing, opaque and hidden fees, and few improvements and innovations” on the part of companies like Ticketmaster.
If passed, the bill would limit contracts between ticket service providers and venues to a maximum of four years. The Department of Justice is also said to have launched an antitrust investigation into the owner of Ticketmaster.
“We appreciate all the work Blumenthal is doing,” Shubert Executive Director Anthony McDonald said Monday. As a local nonprofit, he said, the Shubert “tries to keep prices low for our patrons… and when a patron is picking their seat, they see a full ticket price before they actually get to that cart.”
McDonald said the Shubert works with arts enterprise software Tessitura rather than Ticketmaster to manage their ticket sales. Ticketmaster’s problematic behavior, he argued, not only hurts the arts but the publics’ perception and relationship to live performance.
Blumenthal, in turn, praised the Shubert: “This is a nationally renowned place of entertainment and artistic achievement. It’s a place that does right by its fans.”
“Ticketmaster ought to take a look in the mirror and say, ‘I’m the problem it’s me,’” Blumenthal declared, quoting some of Swift’s lyrics.
“It’s great to know you’re a fan and you get the references,” Richmond Le told the Senator. Le had just seen Swift perform in her hometown of Philadelphia Saturday night. “It was phenomenal, but I’m sure many fans were not granted this opportunity.”
Blumenthal is “here to protect us, to protect Taylor,” he said.
A "Magical" Show In Philadelphia
Le, a business major who graduated from UConn this past spring, said he draws inspiration from Swift because “she’s such a pro.”
“She’s been doing this since 2006. She’s been playing with the same band since the beginning — she cares about fostering relationships, she connects with so many people, she has a personal touch.”
He said he knew plenty of college friends who were unable to secure tickets for Swift’s tour, but congregated outside concert venues “to make sure Taylor could still be celebrated.”
He also said his college Taylor Swift fan club organized an a capella cover concert for fans who weren’t able to attend the Eras Tour, to which students RSVP’d on a Google Sheets form titled “A Ticketmaster that actually works.”
Le’s peer, Haley Grayson, another recently graduated member of the fan club now applying to medical schools, recalled arriving to class early in November, laptop in hand, ready to be the first online to get her Swift tickets in hand.
“At 10 a.m., you could join the queue. I was in the queue for about a half an hour with like, 20,000 people in front of me. Eventually it got to the point where I could see the stadium and select seats — the website was so slow and so laggy. I kept selecting seats and watching them disappear in front of my eyes — I just kept clicking and clicking until eventually my purchase went through.” She said she was able to secure tickets for her and four other friends at around $250 a piece.
“I was in public in a busy building — I couldn’t even remember the people around me. All I could remember was being so zeroed in on my screen… but I was visibly freaking out. And as a science major, I know what stress is like!”
Grayson will see Swift perform at New Jersey’s Metlife stadium in a couple of weeks.
Le, who said he didn’t manage to buy tickets himself but was able to access seats through a network of fans and friends who all rushed Ticketmaster themselves, said that seeing Swift live in Philadelphia this past weekend was “magical.”
“To see her play in her hometown was a different kind of energy,” he said. “Obviously it was completely sold out. At one point she just stood at the piano in the middle of the concert and the crowd was cheering for her for five minutes straight.”