According to Ticketmaster's recent release, West Coast ticket sales scheduled to begin at 10 a.m. PST would be pushed back to 3 p.m. When I think of the promise of the Metaverse, what I think about is a private equity firm collecting royalty checks on streaming Neil Youngs back catalog to me. That to me is the thing that might change it in the TikTok context. These streaming platforms, which were valued as tech companies, are actually just digital media companies. One thing that is very funny, as I look back on covering tech for the last 10 years, is how much user growth these companies achieved just by launching in additional countries. Swift said there was "a multitude of reasons" why people had "such a hard time trying to get tickets" and is trying to figure out how to "improve" the disastrous rollout moving forward. She said she's "trying to figure out how the situation can be improved moving forward. Along with the tour announcement came information about how fans could score tickets. I dont have insight into her taxes, but obviously she has done movies and she has brand endorsements. She points it at her own music and she points it obviously at this tour, which has enough demand to bring down Ticketmaster and to set off a series of antitrust investigations into whether Ticketmaster is a monopoly, which is incredible. To be fair, the big knock on the music industry during the CD era was that CDs were full of filler tracks in order to make them look like a better value than they were. The music that we are able to listen to is music that can be monetized. Well, if you were on a label, you were going to be giving the majority of any revenue from that CD back to the label as is still done today. This whole episode actually started because our team was talking about Taylor and her masters. Charlie, this was amazing. 2022 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved. They still dont. Over 2 million tickets were sold on Ticketmaster for Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour on Nov. 15 - the most tickets ever sold for an artist in a single day. So, critically, Spotify is just deeply linked to the major labels. Trouble, trouble, trouble Having trouble using Ticketmaster? Like everybody else, she has all those things, but she leans the hardest into music. That dynamic, where you expect more but pay less and the artists are openly struggling, is the most unusual thing about music to me. The Grammy winner also wrote that the situation "really pisses me off" and that she was actively working on a solution for her fans. The rocky presale era for the "Eras Tour" is finally over.. After a long wait, tickets are available on most platforms for Taylor . Please keep in mind: Capital [] Now we live in a world where people can blow up on TikTok overnight and negotiate very favorable terms with a label because they have already built an audience. So Taylor Swift puts out her first CD in 2006. Artists and performers didnt get paid off with radio streams unless they were a songwriter. She certainly wants to own this asset for the amount of money that can be made in streaming. If the structure of this episode is, How are they going to ask you for $20? First it was CDs, now its tours and merch. You need to be posting many times a day, and you need to be figuring out how to create whole moments every single week in order to maintain attention when theres so much other material that people could be focused on. So yeah. All 2 million tickets for the Verified Fan onsale were sold to Verified Fans. I think a lot of it has to do with, frankly, mismatches of supply and demand. I have this theory that music is usually about five years ahead of the rest of media in terms of its relationship to tech whether thats new formats based on new tech, like vinyl to CDs, new business models like streaming, or simply being disrupted by new kinds of artists who use new forms of promotion, like TikTok, in unexpected ways. ", "It goes without saying that I'm extremely protective of my fans," she said. There are just endless ways in which people have gotten the short end of the stick here, and she wants to have the biggest stick in the game and own as much of her music legacy as she possibly can. Getty Images Ticketmaster cancels Taylor Swift public ticket sales due to demand and 'insufficient' supply. Taylor Swift released her first album in 2006. . The singer commented on the issue on her Instagram story on Friday, saying that . Theyre also going to shows and doing their old style stuff as well, but they have more data and tools than ever to figure out what is bubbling up. We have to talk about music licensing. The logic of it makes sense. I think that in continuing to connect with fandoms, there is always going to be a world of people making music and playing music for people because we love human connection. I mean the musicians, yeah. Its truly amazing that 2.4 million people got tickets, but it really pisses me off that a lot of them feel like they went through several bear attacks to get them., 2023 NYP Holdings, Inc. All Rights Reserved, Eminem, Taylor Swift, BTS and more donate items to MusiCares Charity Relief Auction, Taylor Swift is roasted and toasted on a Pop-Tart, Taylor Swift shocks fans with first live performance of Anti-Hero, EmRata curses Ellen DeGeneres after Taylor Swift interview resurfaces, The mega ticket marketplace has apologized. Thats usually the best outcome. It was hard to get national or global distribution without a label. Swifties reported website outages and hours-long waits only to log off empty-handed. Two, she is also an incredible capitalist money machine. That is more or less how the streaming model works. Just to put a cap on this episode, what are the markers you see of positive change? There is no shortage of other people that have done so. LOS ANGELES, CA Trying to buy Taylor Swift tickets for the Eras Tour? The talent scouts whose job it is to go and find new talent are surfing TikTok. They had raised the prices when they went from vinyl and cassettes to CDs. Its beautifully made music, and I understand that they were all dating each other and you can just hear the pain, but I find it tedious and boring. Ticketmaster cancels Taylor Swift public ticket sales due to demand, 'insufficient' supply. The next thing, or at least the promise of the next thing from some very motivated members of the industry, is crypto shit. I dont mean to say that theres zero money. She was acting as a voice for a number of quite unhappy folks at that time. But yes, you were promoting the thing that you could sell. It is getting more difficult because there is more content on TikTok than there ever has been before, so it is becoming harder and harder to break out every single day. There was a nice moment where ringtones started to cushion some of the revenues. "It's truly amazing that 2.4 million people got tickets, but it really pisses me off that a lot of them feel like they went through several bear attacks to get them.". Your job is to go make a ton of bets and hope that one of those will fund all of the bets that fail, and that it does so extremely well and makes you a lot of money. Its like he gets human psychology. Break them up," she tweeted. Dec. 12, 2022, 1:37 PM PST. That just seems very untenable to me. everything else your concert tickets, your merch, your NFTs, whatever it is. There are not as many folks in the middle class of streaming as the streamers would like to say there are. We know that we own over 70 percent of all the listening that happens on Spotify. From the labels perspective, they can predict what kind of money theyre going to hopefully bring in each quarter. (Gareth Cattermole/TAS18/Getty Images for TAS / Getty Images). Politicians even got involved, with House Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeting that Ticketmaster has become a "monopoly" after its merger with Live Nation and that "they need to be reigned in.". Taylor puts out her first record and she wants people to listen to it, so she has to go on radio and on tour. Sometimes the music disappears. People are always going to be upset about their contracts in music. You had a whole different set of distributors, given that there were physical goods, but most of them have shut down. Barfuss said she also tried the following day for the Capital One presale event, only to have my card declined because SeatGeek had charged over 40 transactions totaling $14,286.70 the day before. For the labels, its very clear. It fuels trends that are observed by billions of people within days. The tour, which will be a "journey through the musical eras" of Swift's career, is set to kick off next March in Arizona. It seems as though Ticketmaster should've known that arguably the . Taylor Swift fans were disappointed in the experience with Ticketmaster. So the basic math of going on tour doesnt make sense not only because of all of those macro indicators, but also because there are more artists than ever that want to go on tour. In 2014, she removed her entire back catalog of music from Spotify. When you start getting into the number of people who are actually getting wealthy off of the streaming model, its a very, very small, elite group of people that get to have a successful music career. Right, because Ticketmaster is owned by Live Nation, which owns all the venues, and that is all part of the same company that owns SiriusXM, which promotes the things on the radio. In many ways, she is at her height and shes still breaking records on charts. You and some of your listeners can dispute this, but music is not a technology business. Some potential ticket buyers were locked out of the sale when their Verified Fan codes failed to work, while others were initially able to secure tickets, only to lose them and get kicked out of the process once they tried to check out. What we can sell them is convenience, as opposed to the chaos of piracy. So much information is not accessible. When you are a young artist trying to come up, and youre like, I need to build an audience on TikTok so I can go to a label and have some leverage to get back from the label what I want, how big of an audience do you need? There are no founder-friendly music labels out there. Spotify is the only major streamer that is not subsidized by a larger tech company. I recognize Im a dinosaur and thats fine. Okay, theyre working to sell my product because they have a financial stake in the product too.. With music, the expectation is that it is effectively free. Were talking about crypto. I am openly curious and I do not say that with any sort of darker cynicism whether or not the reality of those forecastable revenues from licensing and music catalogs will play out. Its very challenging to be able to make a living without streaming hundreds of thousands of songs. Ticketmaster has canceled the public sale of Taylor Swift's "The Eras Tour" after high demand in the pre-sales. Im not going to make excuses for anyone because we asked them, multiple times, if they could handle this time of demand and we were assured they could, Swift said of the ticket fiasco. A lot of songwriters liked that model. And that is true; I am on guitar solo TikTok. "First, we want to apologize to Taylor and all of her fans especially those who had a terrible experience trying to purchase tickets. And the U.S. Senate subcommittee that handles antitrust and consumer rights matters revealed it plans to hold a hearing to discuss concerns about Ticketmaster in the wake of the Eras errors. On Thursday, Ticketmaster canceled its general sale of the tour tickets that was supposed to debut on Friday after hours of complaints about pre-sale site complications and glitches. Tickets, $40-$146, Seat Geek. of residency or put Taylor . They want to have a relationship with it. This was a religious war inside the tech and media industries. There was a better option. Now theyre an audio company. Looks like I'll get to see more of your beautiful faces than previously expected we're adding 8 shows to the tour," the singer wrote on Twitter. We have seen the massive devaluation of Netflix. While they estimated that only 15% of users experienced issues, Ticketmaster recognized "that's 15% too many, including passcode validation errors that caused fans to lose tickets they had carted." He, like Taylor, is brilliant at understanding where the culture is at and how to say or do something on the edge of acceptability within certain communities, to then cause uproar, backlash, and embrace. I think that the listening might shift towards the people who are less interested in music, but, Hey, Im going to put on a chill playlist, and the chill playlist is background to help me study. I think a meaningful amount of revenue could be lost there. Taylor Swift, interestingly enough, is a great way of looking at the different eras of the music industry, of when they began and when they ended. Quotes displayed in real-time or delayed by at least 15 minutes. AI tech companies come at me, fine, whatever, but its not a tech business. In terms of it being a threat, though, I think its more a new pathway to potentially create stars. You can get your one robot nursery rhyme to go viral on TikTok, but then you dont have any other moves. Shes an amazing songwriter. At the request of Swift's team, the ticket seller said on Monday that . They want to exit or they actually believe in this system and think that those revenues in the future are going to be very valuable. According to a Ticketmaster release, fans who received the email will receive a separate invitation where they can submit a purchase request to Ticketmaster by Dec. 23. Vinyl is a small but meaningfully growing share of the music revenue pie.. So yes, there are other breakout stars, and there are more and more of them every single day. Hopeful concert attendees could register in advance through Ticketmaster's Verified Fan Program for a Nov. 15 presale, while Capital One cardholders could participate in another presale happening that same day. In the case of touring, there are way more artists than ever that want to tour at the moment because they had to hold back during COVID-19. (Fox News Digital / Fox News), Many fans sat in the Ticketmaster queue and were told they would need to start the process over. Because all the way up to Midnights, she has been a master of marketing an album, but nobody knew at the time that this was going to happen. Its very possible that someone might need this company because with music, to your point, you cant bet against the internet. I mean, depending on what happens in the stock market in the coming year, I think its very possible that they become an acquisition target for a tech company that needs a streamer. If and when virtual reality becomes a compelling, mainstream product for many, many people, music will certainly be at the centerpiece . The whole model feels utterly precarious right now. What Im getting at is that the marketing funnel is really hard. According to Ticketmaster's recent release, West Coast ticket sales scheduled to begin at 10 a.m. PST would be pushed back to 3 p.m. It's going to happen," Swift said when asked by the host, adding, "We will do it and it will be great.". She got into a fight about Apple Music, but now shes one of the faces of Apple Music. "You have no idea how much that means.". Whenever I think about the state of the music industry and its business, I find myself coming to talk to Charlie Harding. "I'm not going to make excuses for anyone because we asked them, multiple times, if they could handle this kind of demand and we were assured they could. I had Loverfest tickets (which supposedly boosted me). Its the future of music. Again, it stood as an admission of, We cant sell this stuff. Now theyre saying, You need a following. It was the labels job to promote you, manufacture CDs, truck those CDs to stores all over the country, manage their relationships with physical media, and distribute it. It . Then inside of that, you might make some ancillary deals to re-record or whatever. They get early options in Spotify and they get guaranteed payments per year early on, so theyre certain that many millions of dollars are going to come into their coffers, even if no one listens to the service. Google does not organize the worlds information and make it universally accessible. Right? ", Swift said that the Eras Tour would kick off on March 18, 2023, in Glendale, Arizona, and conclude on Aug. 5, 2023, in Los Angeles. Everyone is mad at Ticketmaster, and like, Dua Lipa needs to go home. You want to own the most amount of that master recording as you possibly can. She also shared the names of the performers who will be joining her onstage for her opening acts, including Paramore, Phoebe Bridgers and HAIM, before ending with a message to her fans: "I can't WAIT to see your gorgeous faces out there. In response to the report, Live Nation issued a statement on its website, saying that it "takes its responsibilities under the antitrust laws seriously and does not engage in behaviors that could justify antitrust litigation. You cant put that genie back in the bottle. Now she has a massive fan base that she commands. It seems like in the past two years especially, it has remodeled the music industry. It met more needs for a smaller slice of people that were less discerning, and then it just took over everything because it was more convenient. There are public funds now where you can invest in music publishing. I love having you on the show. To get the $20 at the end, we have to front too much money. We can probably model some churn based on if theyre listening to great music from the 50s or 60s. We now live in an intellectual property business, where a lot of these things are never actually even printed. ", "Last week, the competition problem in ticketing markets was made painfully obvious when Ticketmaster's website failed hundreds of thousands of fans hoping to purchase concert tickets," said Klobuchar in a statement, citing how the "high fees, site disruptions and cancellations" customers were faced with showed that Ticketmaster "does not face any pressure to continually innovate and improve. Theyre making a really big gamble about their future. You said at the beginning here that streaming feels like its on the rocks. I mean, you cant take that away. People arent getting paid enough. How much of that money went to her as the artist, in general? "We strive to make ticket buying as easy as possible for fans, but that hasn't been the case for many people trying to buy tickets for Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour," Ticketmaster began in the statement. We have to add some stipulations before we begin a conversation on Taylor Swift. ", She continued, "That's why we will hold a hearing on how consolidation in the live entertainment and ticketing industry harms customers and artists alike. When things cant keep going up in business cycles, investors take note and disruptors take note, and there will be something else at some other point. There was some weirdness with it, but the artists seemed happy with that arrangement. "UM. The Midnights singer's loyal listeners have taken the company to task after the ticket-buying process for her upcoming Eras Tour resulted in chaos. Many fans took to the internet to criticize Ticketmaster's handling of the pre-sales, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y. Ticketmaster merged with Live Nation in 2010, a move which has been criticized as creating a monopoly. There are just countless ways that people are trying to use these, including ownership of actual music, being able to have an exclusive license to music, or weird pictures of gifs that were made by an AI. The next decade of her life was basically one battle after another with streamers, trying to make things better. "It obviously wasn't meant to be if we didn't get tickets but we're upset. A lot of her actions have helped on the margins. While appearing on The Graham Norton Show, the "Bejeweled" singer first teased an upcoming tour tied to the release of her latest album. Theres a limit on venues and they all seem monopolistically controlled. They have been growing and they are listening in this way. So many people have tried to launch live audio experiences. EMI was eventually bought by Universal, so there was a lot of consolidation on the label side. 4 tickets together to the ERA'S TOUR Taylor Swift on Saturday May 13th (5/13/23)! A fan who had been sent a verified code was told the Ticketmaster account wasn't linked to the Verified Fan sale. Taylor Swifts dispute over her masters in 2019 and 2020, is another attempt for her to wrestle back control over her music, and get more money for it. The Ticketmaster site was not prepared for the volume of Taylor Swift fans logging on for Tuesday's verified fan presale. Its still not the entire penny. She has not yet had to make that turn, but the midline artist is desperate for the next thing they can sell. The iPod is out, but Apple is still saying, Rip. I could probably name a bunch of 90s bands here, but I think were already at risk with the Taylor Swift fans. There are many versions of this story. The singer commented on the issue on her Instagram story on Friday, saying that Ticketmaster had assured her team "multiple times" they "could handle this kind of demand. . She was the product of a Nashville system and she did not have a built-in fan base when she released her first record. You were talking about how if you go viral on TikTok, then all of your fans will go listen to you on Spotify, then they might go buy a T-shirt, then they might end up buying a tour ticket. I have to say, theres something very dystopian in a business context about saying she wants to own the whole fraction of a penny. Thank you so much. Invites will also be staggered by tour dates in each city. No offers below $2500. Right. The Post reached out to Ticketmaster for comment on the lawsuit. She was upset about the low streaming rates that youre talking about. Everyone was putting their albums on streaming, and people were having a great time exploring Spotify. 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