😤 Don’t Mess With The Swifties

We write a weekly newsletter on all things Music, and the Business and Tech behind it. If you’d like to get it directly in your inbox, subscribe now!

Happy Monday everyone!

There are three things certain in life, Death, Taxes & Taylor Swift breaking the Internet with every new album drop 💥

While Benjamin Franklin’s original quote has been butchered enough times to make anyone forget its original context, if the American statesman was alive today, i’m sure he would agree with this.

The album became so wildly popular within a few hours of its release, that every song on Top 10 chart on the Billboard Hot 100 was occupied by the album, the first time ever in its 64 year old history 👇🏻

For the first time ever, every single song on the Top 10 chart of the Billboard Hot 100 was occupied by a single artist

However, it’s easy to get lost into these numbers.

After all, with over 100,000 new songs released on streaming platforms on a daily basis, it’s hard to keep track of new music anymore. Yet, when the biggest stars drop new music, the entire world stops and takes notice.

Drake, Kendrick Lamar, Harry Styles & Bad Bunny join Taylor Swift in the list of highest streamed albums in 2022

While Swift has been in the limelight ever since she made her debut as a teenage country singer, this time around, her album has created controversy enough for US Congress to get involved 🏛

If you’re looking for a breakdown of how exactly Taylor Swift rose to fame from an obscure Country Pop singer, check out our previous piece!

How exactly?

Announced earlier last month, Swift finally broke news that she is hitting the road again, starting a countrywide tour in March 2023, across 27 locations in America 🇺🇸

While it’s pretty normal for her gigs to be sold out within minutes, this time around, the demand to see Swift live in action is so insane, that tickets to her Las Vegas gig saw prices climb upto $95,000 🚀

Not just that, the demand to see Swift perform live in action outstripped the supply by such a degree that she would have to play 900 Stadium shows- basically every night for the next 2.5 years to cater to everyone who wanted a ticket 😳

And this is despite already selling 2 Million tickets to Verified Fans in a single day via TicketMaster.

Here’s a blog from Ticketmaster- the company that handled the ticketing for Swift’s gig, explaining why millions of fans were locked out of the website despite having pre-registered for the sale.

So why is Congress getting involved?

Taking note of the public outburst at the inability of Ticketmaster to serve its customers, Senator Amy Klobuchar, who leads the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Competition Policy, Antitrust, and Consumer Rights, which will conduct the hearing, wrote:

“The high fees, site disruptions and cancellations that customers experienced shows how Ticketmaster’s dominant market position means the company does not face any pressure to continually innovate and improve.”

“When there is no competition to incentivize better services and fair prices, we all suffer the consequences.”

Senator Klobuchar has been leading the fight to investigate monopolistic practices of Live Nation Entertainment

Here’s the letter she wrote to Michael Rapino, the President & CEO of Live Nation Entertainment , Ticketmaster’s parent company, claiming how it’s a monopoly on live events in the US.

Even AOC, the far-left liberal in Congress who seems to have an opinion about everything, chimed into this debate.

https://twitter.com/AOC/status/1592587226801934336?s=20&t=Yy-mpM3Qoa48FNX_zgDiqQ

So how much truth lies in their claim about the merger of Ticketmaster & Live Nation being an effective monopoly?

Ticketmaster pretty much blows every other competitor away in terms of their market-share of new app installs 📲

While that might be just one metric to look at, this piece from the Rolling Stone breaks down the history of Ticketmaster & Live Nation before their merger in 2010, & how they are culprits behind average ticket prices to concerts rising 10x since 1990.

Did you make it this far? Seems like you’re digging our content! Why not share this with someone and help support us?

Our take on this?

If there was one takeaway i’d probably have from this entire saga, it’d probably be:

“Don’t Mess With The Swifties”

This seven figure large fanbase has yet again proven the amount of collective leverage it has when it comes to virtual communities.

Given the interest Congress is showing in this matter, apart from wanting to set up a fair playing ground for companies to compete in the live events space, I believe appeasing this cohort of ‘Swifties’ will not hurt the chances of the Democratic Party to gain some brownie points with a young voter base, especially with the Presidential Elections around the corner.

Why?

Theoretically, no one is stopping a company from starting afresh in the live-events space, but it would probably take years to reach the level of power established by Ticketmaster, founded back in 1976.

Of course that doesn’t mean that you couldn’t.

Players such as are giants in their own right, but are more focused on the re-sale & secondary markets, unlike Ticketmaster which under its parent company Live Nation works directly with artists & fans.

It’ll be interesting to see how the Congressional hearing pans out, and whether there exists any legitimacy to breaking up the dominance of Ticketmaster & Live Nation.

Some artists have taken matters into their own hands, & experimented with going direct to fans with Music NFT’s acting as passes for their live-gigs, but the cyclic nature of the Crypto markets means that the hype of these use-cases lives & dies every few years.

On our Instagram page, we recently did a poll & asked users if they’d prefer a $34k NFT instead of paying that much for a Taylor Swift gig, & the result wasn’t what I expected 👇🏻

Would you guys buy an NFT instead & going through the hassle of waiting for gig tickets?

Let us know in the comments!

If you liked this newsletter from Incentify, why not share it with someone you like?

P.S- Follow us on Instagram and Twitter for more such content on all things Music and Culture, now!

Originally published at https://incentify.substack.com on November 28, 2022.