Taylor Swift Ticketmaster fiasco is fault of demand, bots, Liberty Media CEO says

Now we acquired unhealthy bots.

The CEO of Liberty Media, Dwell Nation’s largest shareholder, defended the occasion promoter in opposition to calls that it must be damaged up following a storm of glitches and website failures throughout Ticketmaster presales this week for Taylor Swift’s upcoming tour.

Dwell Nation is sympathetic to followers who could not get tickets, Greg Maffei mentioned on CNBC’s “Squawk on the Road” Thursday. “It is a operate of Taylor Swift. The location was speculated to open up for 1.5 million verified Taylor Swift followers. We had 14 million folks hit the location, together with bots, which aren’t speculated to be there.”

Maffei mentioned Ticketmaster bought greater than 2 million tickets on Tuesday and demand for Swift “might have crammed 900 stadiums.”

“This exceeded each expectation,” he mentioned, explaining that a lot of the demand was centered on the truth that Swift has not toured since 2018’s “Fame” stadium tour.

Liberty Media owns stakes in an enormous array of media and leisure pursuits. On Thursday, it introduced that it could cut up off the Main League Baseball’s Atlanta Braves into an asset-backed inventory. Liberty additionally mentioned it could create a brand new inventory known as Liberty Dwell, which can embrace its stake in Dwell Nation.

Dwell Nation, which merged with Ticketmaster in 2010, has confronted longstanding criticisms about its dimension and energy within the leisure business. Individuals amplified their complaints this week when tickets for Taylor Swift upcoming Eras tour went on presale on Ticketmaster’s web site. The corporate was pressured to increase presales after followers flocked to the location, inflicting website disruptions and gradual queues.

Maffei additionally defended Dwell Nation in opposition to lawmaker and activist issues that Ticketmaster and Dwell Nation are abusing their market energy. One staunch objector to the corporate’s decade’s-old merger has been Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y, who tweeted Tuesday that Dwell Nation and Ticketmaster must be damaged up.

“Although AOC might not like each factor of our enterprise, curiously, AEG, our competitor, who’s the promoter for Taylor Swift, selected to make use of us as a result of, in actuality, we’re the biggest and simplest ticket vendor on this planet,” Maffei mentioned. “Even our rivals need to come on our platform.”

Activists argue that as a result of Dwell Nation controls 70% of the ticketing and dwell occasion venues market, rivals have little alternative on the place to promote their tickets and have known as on the Division of Justice to reverse the 2010 merger.