According to the top-charting singer herself, ticket sales for the forthcoming Taylor Swift tour have not been doing all that well thus far.

When the first wave of tickets for Taylor Swift’s upcoming 52-date Eras Tour went on sale on Tuesday, many fans were left dissatisfied and without tickets as a result of confusing messages, lengthy wait times, and temporary outages on the website of Ticketmaster. This tour will be Swift’s first since 2018 and will take place in 2019.

Ticketmaster has rescheduled further rounds in response to what it has described as “historically unparalleled demand.” The company stated that “millions” of people had attempted to get pre-sale tickets, but only hundreds of thousands had been successful.

It was announced on Thursday afternoon that the sale would be completely canceled due to “extraordinarily high demands on ticketing systems and insufficient remaining ticket inventory to meet that demand.” The day before the sale was scheduled to begin, tickets were supposed to be made available to the general public.

The frenzy has drawn increased scrutiny to the massive Ticketmaster, which has been accused for a long time by detractors of abusing its market position to the detriment of customers. Would-be concertgoers have been vocal about their dissatisfaction with recent events involving near-instantaneous sellouts and increasing costs, while musicians such as Pearl Jam and Bruce Springsteen have been public about their frustration with the issue during the course of their careers.

One of the most popular complaints is that there does not appear to be a clear alternative to Ticketmaster or a clear competitor, especially since it joined with event provider Live Nation in the year 2010. (a controversial move that required conditional approval from the U.S. Department of Justice).

Now, the attorney general of Tennessee, who is a Republican, has opened a consumer protection investigation into the incident, and Democratic lawmakers are asking concerns about the company’s dominance – and this isn’t the first time they’ve done so.

NPR has reached out to Ticketmaster for comment, but the company has not yet provided a response. However, on Thursday, Ticketmaster issued a statement titled “The Taylor Swift On Sale Explained.”

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut), one of several lawmakers who have long called for an investigation and accountability into the company, particularly after becoming a subsidiary of concert behemoth Live Nation, tweeted that “Taylor Swift’s tour sale is a perfect example of how the Live Nation/Ticketmaster merger harms consumers by creating a near-monopoly.” Ticketmaster became a subsidiary of Live Nation in 2015.

In addition to that, he found some motivation in the lyrics that Swift herself had written, which stated that “Consumers deserve better than this anti-hero behavior.”

Throughout the years, numerous Democratic congressmen have advocated for increased antitrust enforcement. Most recently, in April 2021 and March of this year, they requested that the Justice Department conduct an investigation into the level of competition present in the ticketing industry.

Others, such as Senator Amy Klobuchar, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Competition Policy, Antitrust, and Consumer Rights, want to hear from Ticketmaster directly as well.

Klobuchar stated on Thursday that she had written a letter to the president and CEO of Ticketmaster, Michael Rapino, expressing her worry over the lack of competition and inquiring about certain business practices.

She noted that “Ticketmaster’s power in the primary ticket market insulates it from the competitive constraints that generally encourage enterprises to innovate and improve their services.” This is because Ticketmaster has a dominant position in the primary ticket market. “This can result in the kind of severe service disruptions we saw this week, and the customers are the ones who pay the price for it.”

Ticketmaster was only allowed to merge with Live Nation as a result of an antitrust consent decree. The order included several requirements that were designed to prevent Ticketmaster from abusing its dominant position in the market. Klobuchar voiced her concern about a “pattern of non-compliance” with regard to those legal requirements, citing the numerous complaints that have been lodged.

She asked Rapino to respond in writing to a set of five questions by Wednesday. The questions included how much the company has invested in upgrading its systems to address demand surges, what percentage of high-profile tour tickets are typically available to the general public, and whether or not it is aware of any complaints to government agencies about noncompliance in the past 12 months.

Klobuchar also mentions that her concerns go back much further than that and that they have been ongoing for much longer.

She wrote that she had “been wary of the combination of these companies since you combined in 2011 when the Senate had a hearing into the merger.” “I have been skeptical of the combination of these companies since then,” she said. “You were a witness who testified during the hearing and made a commitment to “build an easy-access, one-stop platform that can distribute… tickets.” You stated that you were “sure that this plan will succeed,” which is an interesting take on the phrase. It would appear that your faith was misplaced in this situation.”

A number of Democratic politicians have taken to Twitter in order to express their grievances against the firm; many of them have referred to it as a monopoly and demanded that it be broken up.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez remarked on Twitter that “a daily reminder that Ticketmaster is a monopoly, its merger with Live Nation should never have been permitted, and they need to be reigned in.” Ticketmaster and Live Nation are two of the world’s largest ticketing companies (D-N.Y.). “Tear them to pieces.”

Ticketmasters’ wait times and costs have been regarded as “the symptom of a broader problem” by Rep. David Cicilline (D-R.I.), who chairs the House Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial and Administrative Law.

“It should not come as a surprise that Live Nation and Ticketmaster operate as an unregulated monopoly,” he continued.

Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-New Jersey) was quick to weigh in on the Taylor Swift debacle after it occurred.

In a tweet sent out on Thursday, he reiterated some of the points he had made in a previous post published on Tuesday. He said, “You’d think with their unending list of fees Ticketmaster should have a working website.” “Break up the monopoly that Live Nation and Ticketmaster have.”

Ticketmaster provided an explanation for how it prepared for the pre-sale period in a statement released on Thursday. The company noted that 3.5 million people pre-registered for the Verified Fan program, which was the largest number of people to do so in the company’s entire history. This number “informed the artist team’s decision to add additional dates” to the tour.

The company claims that making customers utilize Verified Fan invite codes has traditionally been an effective way to handle the large number of customers that visit the website to purchase tickets; however, this was not the case on Tuesday.

“The staggering number of bot attacks as well as fans who didn’t have invite codes drove unprecedented traffic on our site,” it said, adding that it slowed down some sales and pushed others back in order to stabilize its systems, which resulted in longer wait times for some users. 

According to its estimations, approximately 15% of interactions made through the website suffered difficulties, which the company referred to as “15% too many.” On the other hand, it stated that an unprecedented number of fans were able to purchase tickets: On Tuesday, more than 2 million tickets were sold for Taylor Swift’s tour, which was the most ever sold for a single day by an artist.

Ticketmaster has admitted that in-demand sales present technological issues and has stated that even if this were not the case, a significant number of people would still be unable to purchase tickets.

According to the information provided, “For instance, based on the volume of visitors to our site, Taylor would need to conduct over 900 stadium shows, which is approximately 20 times the number of shows she is doing.” That means a show at a stadium will take place each and every night for the next 2.5 years.

During an interview on Thursday, Ticketmaster’s single largest shareholder seemed to point the finger of blame in Swift’s direction as well.

Greg Maffei, CEO of Liberty Media, which owns a majority stake in Live Nation, stated on CNBC’s Squawk on the Street that the company is sympathetic to fans but that the demand was simply too great. He suggested that this was due to the fact that Taylor Swift hasn’t gone on tour in the past five years. Live Nation has a majority stake in Liberty Media.

He explained it by saying that it was Taylor Swift’s fault. “It was anticipated that 1.5 million confirmed Taylor Swift admirers would have access to the site when it launched. The website was visited by 14 million users, some of which were bots that are not permitted to be on the website.”

If the flood of angry tweets that followed that explanation is any indication, fans did not take kindly to the explanation. Swift has not made any public statements regarding the Ticketmaster debacle; nevertheless, a quick search of her Instagram account reveals that her bio still includes the following lyrics from one of her most recent hits: “I’m the problem, it’s me.” Swift has not addressed the issue with Ticketmaster.