The Price of Pop Fandom (Pitchfork)

Julie had a plan. And a backup plan. And several safeguards she spent a week finessing ahead of time. And yet, at the end of her day-long nightmare spent trying to buy seats to Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, she had no tickets to speak of. She had put them in her cart 41 different times, only to receive an error message with each purchase. When she reached out to a customer-service rep, they suggested the system had registered Julie as a bot since she was trying so hard to get tickets. When she went another route—the presale reserved for Capital One credit card holders—she was told she was over the spending limit on the card she had gotten for this express purpose. Roughly $14,000 in charges, from the 41 failed attempts, was still being held on the card.

The 52-year-old from Salt Lake City, Utah is one of the millions of Swift fans who melted down for a moment last November. She’s also among the small group of Swifties that went on to sue Ticketmaster and its parent company Live Nation over the botched rollout of presale tickets, with the suggestion of fraud, price-fixing, and antitrust violations. Eras-gate was a flash point for the big ticketing problem: Verified Fans and bots alike essentially broke the Ticketmaster site, and prompted a government investigation in the process.

Ticketmaster and Live Nation, which merged in 2010, control the bulk of the American live-music industry, from ticketing to venues to tour production. At the top of this year, the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing looking into the company’s operations. Now, a variety of proposed legislation on both the state and federal level aims to increase competition in the marketplace for live event tickets. Just last week, the Senate Commerce Committee advanced a measure that would require transparency around ticket fees. Campaigns such as Fix the Tix—a coalition whose members range from the National Independent Venue Association and the Future of Music Coalition to the Recording Industry Association of America and Universal Music Group—continue to push for deeper changes, such as a ban on the sale of “speculative” tickets, or tickets that the seller doesn’t actually own.