Why is Everybody Blaming Ticketmaster and Not Taylor Swift?

She created this monster demand, and she decided how to manage it.

The perfidy of Ticketmaster in charging rich teenage girls hundreds of dollars to see Taylor Swift in concert does not rank high on my list of social ills. But it’s an interesting economic problem. Everybody wants to identify market concentration as the villain of this piece, and certainly Ticketmaster exploits its near-monopoly over ticket sales in troublesome ways. Rolling Stone has its knickers in a twist because the parent company’s chairman had the nerve to suggest that La Swift was not an innocent bystander to this fiasco. But he’s right. It was Swift who created this monster demand and then agreed, like an Uber driver on a rainy night, to manage it through dynamic pricing. She figured, reasonably, that if anyone was going to harvest the windfall from an extreme mismatch between supply and demand, better it be herself than the scalpers. And anyway, the scalpers did just fine, with one ticket offered by StubHub for more than $22,000.

I think it’s time for the most in-demand pop artists to start video-streaming their concerts. That would bring demand down to a manageable level. It would also cut out Ticketmaster, a definite plus, and cut out the scalpers, an even bigger plus. Watching a concert streaming on a movie screen or on your TV at home, not necessarily live, diminishes bragging rights and the thrilling sense of “being there.” You might feel a little silly dancing in your otherwise empty living room. But from an aesthetic point of view, how “there” are you, really, when you attend a Swift concert in a huge arena? The music is amplified and unless you have the best seats in the house you’re probably watching the concert on a Jumbotron. That’s the subject of my latest New Republic piece.