Exploring the Adverse Effects of Ticketmaster’s Monopoly
Khoury/ECE Associate Professor Wil Robertson explains how the cyberattack by bots that Ticketmaster suffered from during the sale of tickets for Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour reflects the company’s monopolistic position within the concert industry.
This article originally appeared on Northeastern Global News. It was published by Cody Mello-Klein. Main photo: When Ticketmaster opened up presale tickets for Taylor Swift’s first tour since 2018, fans were quickly overwhelmed by bots swooping into scoop up tickets. But Northeastern University cybersecurity and antitrust experts say Ticketmaster should have been better equipped to handle the issue. AP Photo by: Rolf Vennenbernd
Live Nation Entertainment blamed bots for the Taylor Swift ticket fiasco. Is it a legitimate explanation or just an excuse?
Music industry monolith Live Nation Entertainment, owner of Ticketmaster, faced a united front of political opposition during a Senate Judiciary Hearing this week, as Democrats and Republicans criticized the company for its mishandling of Taylor Swift ticket sales last fall.
During the three-hour hearing, senators from across the political spectrum grilled the company’s president and CFO, Joe Berchtold, questioning the company’s bullish business practices and monopolization of the music industry. In some cases, senators even called for the dissolution of the 2010 merger between Live Nation and Ticketmaster.
“This is all the definition of monopoly,” said Sen. Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat from Minnesota, during the hearing. “Live Nation is so powerful that it doesn’t even need to exert pressure, it doesn’t need to threaten, because people just fall in line.”
Berchtold acknowledged Ticketmaster’s botched presale of tickets for Taylor Swift’s “Eras Tour,” the artist’s first tour since 2018. Fans who had waited for hours in a digital queue were frustrated when they faced either exorbitant fees or, more commonly, couldn’t even get tickets at all. Even Swifties in Ticketmaster’s Verified Fan program, who were able to get in early for the presale, were out of luck.
In his attempts to explain what went wrong, Berchtold said Ticketmaster has been the target of a large-scale cyberattack by bots. These programs carry out automated action online in a way that appears human-like and are often deployed by scalpers to crowd out real fans, scooping up large amounts of tickets and reselling them for well above fair market price.
William Robertson, an associate professor of computer science at Northeastern University, says that Berchtold’s characterization of the Taylor Swift debacle is fair. Bots are a prevalent issue in ticket sales, and a bot invasion was clearly part of the problem in this case. But that’s not the whole story, he says.
“Ticketmaster’s statement seems to imply that this cyberattack is somehow unexpected when in fact this attack is and has been a known, core threat to their business for a long time now,” Robertson told Northeastern Global News. “The only aspect of this incident that is perhaps unprecedented is the scale of the attack.”
The most common defense against bots is a CAPTCHA, a test that determines whether a web user is a human or a program. But scalpers have become very good at fooling these tests, Robertson says, to the point where there is an entire segment of the cybersecurity industry focused on this very issue.
Robertson admits it’s “unreasonable to expect that Ticketmaster can stop all bot attacks.” However, the brutal efficiency with which bots penetrated Ticketmaster’s system last November is indicative of a bigger issue that was the focus of this week’s hearing: the company’s monopoly on the concert industry and the merger that helped it secure that position in the first place.
“It’s clear that they should be doing more and, without strong competition or regulatory action, it would seem they do not have enough incentive to invest in this part of their business,” Robertson says.
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