Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour is on track to sell $591 million in tickets — leaving Ticketmaster with a relative pittance and buckets of bad PR
Since then, Ticketmaster’s fees have also soared. In 1995, a U.S. PIRG study found that Ticketmaster added an average 27% in fees to ticket prices based on a study of 80 events from California to Maryland, according to the Chicago Tribune. By October 2022, Ticketmaster’s fees were as high as 78%, according to Vulture.
Madonna — whose 2008 and 2009 Sticky & Sweet tour held the previous record with $407 million in sales — will drop to second place on the list of top-grossing female touring artists. The additional money for Swift will come from selling merchandise at the venues — which could add an estimated $87 million in proceeds — much of which she would keep. As Herlihy explained, “At each venue she would be likely to sell out 30,000 pieces of merchandise at an average price of $80 per item. Thirty percent of that would go to the venue and the remainder would go to Swift and the promoter.
Those restrictions reduced the number of ‘Eras’ tickets that reached the secondary market — where they sold at a whopping 6.6 times more than the primary market price. According to TiqIQ, only 1,100 tickets ‘Eras’ tickets per show were sold on the secondary market compared to about 50,000 for the average show. Meanwhile, as of December 14, the average secondary market ticket price was $1,425 .
Ticketmaster’s secondary market share ranges from 15% to 20%, according to the US Government Accountability Office. Billboard estimates that Swift’s restrictions on secondary market sales cost Ticketmaster “between $3.8 million to $5 million in fees.” Another way to assess how consumer surplus has changed is to look at the quality of the consumer experience. Ticketmaster’s service has a very poor rating now. According to, “Ticketmaster customer service is ranked #756 out of the 1007 companies that have a CustomerServiceScoreboard.com rating with an overall score of 24.97 out of a possible 200 based upon 224 ratings. This score rates Ticketmaster customer service and customer support as Terrible.
One fan, Mariam Rodríguez Luna, spent $700 on a ticket and camped out all night to be first in line to enter the stadium. When she arrived at the gate, the agent said the ticket was fake. She was one of 1,600 who were denied entry after saying that they had bought directly from Ticketmaster. Herlihy suggests that breaking up Live Nation could unleash market forces to fix the hedonic horror. “Live Nation could be broken up into three companies: a ticketing service, a venue operator, and artist management firm. [The companies would operate without contracts, say, that tie artists who want to perform in Live Nation venues to use Ticketmaster’s ticketing services.] This would unleash competition for the best service quality at the lowest price.
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