How Ticketmaster Ticked Off Taylor Swift and her Fans

As a crisis unfolds, a company must quickly adapt to the public’s reaction, a lesson that Ticketmaster learned the hard way in 2022 with Taylor Swift’s New Eras Tour, the singer’s first tour in four years.

We have five takeaways on crisis communications from the ticket sales fiasco that launched a record-breaking concert tour that took in $2 billion.

Minutes after the company started selling tickets on the morning of Nov. 15, 2022, its website started crashing. Millions of people were unable to purchase tickets on the first day, even though they had pre-sale codes as part of the company’s Verified Fan program, which was created in 2017 to stymie ticket brokers.

 About 14 million users, including bots sent by brokers, hit a site designed to accommodate 1.5 million people.

Fans at first reacted with frustration, asking for an acknowledgement of the problems and solutions. One day later the attitude changed to outrage, with accusations of corporate greed and abuse of market power. The media coverage was intense.

Ticketmaster and its parent company, Live Nation Entertainment, fueled the shift with half-hearted apologies and attempts to redirect the blame, according to a recent study by Dane Kiambi, a professor of public relations at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and former student Katie Zabel.

Eventually, about 2.4 million tickets were sold, but millions more people were not just disappointed but angry about the process. Among them: Taylor Swift herself.

“It really pisses me off that a lot of them feel like they went through several bear attacks” to buy tickets, she said in a social media post on Nov. 18.

Aftermath
The debacle revived antitrust concerns first raised in 2010, when Live Nation, a concert promoter and ticket seller, acquired Ticketmaster, the leading ticketing company. Critics said the transaction gave Live Nation too much power over tickets, artist management, promotion and venue ownership.

In May 2024, the Biden administration’s Justice Department filed an antitrust suit against Ticketmaster and Live Nation, joined by many state attorneys general.

On March 9, 2026, after the trial began, the Justice Department under President Trump announced a settlement had been reached, with the parent company paying $280 million in damages and changing its ticketing rules.

But 34 states rejected the settlement and took over the trial. Jury deliberations began April 10, the Associated Press reported.

Five lessons
Here are five lessons for crisis communicators drawn from the article by Kiambi and Zabel combined with our own insights.

1. Tell people what to do. Empathize. Amid a crisis, one of the first rules is to help people protect themselves, for example, by issuing safety alerts and recalls. Scholars call this “instructing information.” Then help people recover by expressing concern and offering help, what’s called “adjusting information.”

In the middle of the first day of sales, Ticketmaster’s message on social media acknowledged the problem and announced a new schedule for sales later that day.

But the brief expression of gratitude, “Thank you for your patience …,” fell far short of recognizing people’s deep emotions.

Then, as the frustration and furor mounted, the company clammed up.

“Ticketmaster’s failure to provide proactive updates further heightened frustration,” the authors write.

2. Who’s the victim? From the start, Ticketmaster repeatedly portrayed itself as the injured party, trying to shift the focus away from its lack of preparation.

Even nearly three years after the fiasco, Live Nation President Joe Berchtold still tried to avoid responsibility for the calamitous “onsale,” the name the company gives the scheduled date and time when tickets for an event will be available.

“While the bots failed to penetrate our systems or acquire any tickets, the attack required us to slow down and even pause our sales,” he said in testimony before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee on June 16, 2025. “This is what led to a terrible consumer experience that we deeply regret. As we said after the onsale, and I reiterate today, we apologize to the many disappointed fans as well as to Ms. Swift.”

This strategy “was unlikely to resonate with stakeholders who perceived the crisis as preventable and expected Ticketmaster to take greater accountability,” the authors write.

Meanwhile, after Ticketmaster attempted to avoid responsibility, Swift did an artful job of aligning herself with ticket buyers and pointing the finger back at the company.

“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,” she said in a social media post on the morning of Nov. 18, 2022.

3. You post it, you own it. On Nov. 17, 2022, Ticketmaster posted to its website, “The Taylor Swift Onsale Explained,” which was quickly deleted. The lengthy message describes the issues without offering an explanation.

“When companies issue a statement, it’s permanent,” an executive with PR firm Edelman wrote the next day. “Once it’s out there — especially with millions of fans worldwide watching — trying to go back on what you’ve said only opens the door for more questions.”

The removal was “widely seen as an attempt to obscure, not clarify,” the authors add.

4. Look at our record? Companies often try to minimize a crisis by immediately putting it in the context of solid past performance and its good reputation, a strategy that scholars call “bolstering.”

For example, Ticketmaster said on Nov. 19, “The biggest venues and artists turn to us because we have the leading ticketing technology in the world — that doesn’t mean it’s perfect, and clearly for Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour onsale it wasn’t.”

That same day, when Live Nation responded to calls for an antitrust investigation, it said, “That Ticketmaster continues to be the leader in such an environment is a testament to the platform and those who operate it, not to any anticompetitive business practices.”

The company has taken down the post on its website but it is available on the Internet Archive.

Two problems with this response: First, the companies may have overestimated their reputation for good service among ticket buyers. The problems with the Eras Tour ticket sale likely resonated with previous bad experiences. Second, consumers’ immediate experience conflicted sharply with a positive reputation, even if Ticketmaster had one.

The lesson is that bolstering is better used at a later stage in a crisis.

“Bolstering without first addressing stakeholder harm risks appearing disingenuous or opportunistic,” the authors write. “Crisis messaging that prioritizes image management over stakeholder concerns can inadvertently deepen mistrust.”

5. Make a full apology. “Partial apologies are rarely effective in preventable crises because they fail to meet stakeholder expectations for accountability and action,” the authors write.

Yet this was Ticketmaster’s tactic, distancing itself from responsibility for the website woes.

“We want to apologize to Taylor and all of her fans – especially those who had a terrible experience trying to purchase tickets,” the company said on Nov. 19, 2022.

While Ticketmaster acknowledged bad customer service, it avoided taking responsibility for inadequate preparations or announced steps to prevent a recurrence.

‘Perfect example’
There is a crucial difference between “crises that remain framed as operational failures versus those that escalate into scandals marked by perceptions of ethical violation,” the authors write.

Ticketmaster and Live Nation didn’t recognize that difference.

Zabel, the coauthor, was a student when she brought the Ticketmaster controversy to Kiambi’s attention “as a perfect example of what companies should not do,” according to a story on the Nebraska news site.

And we’ve seen worse.

Tom Corfman, a senior consultant with Ragan Consulting Group, admires Taylor Swift’s business skills as much as her music. Does your crisis communications plan need to be refreshed? Email Tom to set up a free call with RCG partner Jim Ylisela and our crisis expert Nick Lanyi.

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