Creator: Maxinomics · Published: 2025-06-29 · Length: 18:34 · Watch on YouTube

When tickets for Taylor Swift's Eras Tour went on sale, the internet melted down. But was it Ticketmaster's fault? This video makes the case that the melt down was inevitable, guaranteed by one decision from Swift herself: setting artificially low ticket prices. (video description)

1) Detailed outline

[0:00] The Shift to Concerts

• Phil holds up a CD he bought in 1999 for $16, about $31 in today's money, for 15 songs. Albums, tapes, and records were how artists made money, and about 15 cents of every album dollar went to the artist.
• That model "broke hard and fast": news clips mark Napster entering the web's top 50 sites, AC/DC finally arriving on iTunes, and Spotify launching in the U.S. Fans loved it, since most albums didn't have 10 good songs, and the streaming genie was never going back in the bottle.
• Artists went looking for the money they felt they deserved and found it in concerts. Touring used to exist to promote a new album; now it is the income. Concert ticket prices have risen 175%, while unlimited listening has fallen to roughly $130 a year.
• That puts big artists such as Taylor Swift at odds with the company that sells their tickets, Ticketmaster.

[1:15] Eras Tour Meltdown

• Stadium tours are rare, because few artists have enough fans to fill stadiums city after city. Even in Los Angeles, the stadium Phil stands in hosts just seven events in all of July. A stadium tour means you've made it.
• Ed Sheeran played 260 shows in 2019 on his Divide tour, the highest-grossing tour ever until Swift's Eras Tour, which spread 152 shows over two years. After more than five years without touring, demand was "off the charts," with Swifties and giddy news anchors all over it.
• On November 15, 2022 at 10:00 a.m., every ticket for every stop went on sale at once. The site crashed under billions of requests (the captions are garbled on the exact figure), fans waited in online queues for six hours or more and came up empty, and tickets appeared on resale sites like StubHub for $5,000 and even $30,000.
• Swift blamed Ticketmaster, which Phil says was partly at fault, but he argues one choice by Swift guaranteed this outcome: two groups with opposite goals smashing refresh. Fans mostly failed. Professional resellers had their biggest day ever, "bigger than the World Cup."

[4:00] The Most Expensive Painting in the World

• Phil cuts to the 2017 Christie's auction of Leonardo da Vinci's Salvator Mundi. So many fakes had circulated that no one knew whether the original still existed, until a likely original surfaced in 2005.
• Bidding climbs from $90 million past $200 million and $355 million to a $400 million hammer price. Phil isn't into fine art, but calls it a moment anyone could respect.
• This is exactly what Swift didn't want her fans to face: an auction where the highest bidder wins.

[5:32] Profit Incentive

• There would be no auction. Swift effectively imposed price controls: the best seats were capped at $449, the worst priced at $49, in keeping with her image of protecting fans so anyone who wanted to come could.
• Phil says that's "not how the world works." Everyone, especially scalpers, knew a floor seat was worth thousands, and the cap also reduced Swift's own take.
• By ignoring Ticketmaster's advice to use an auction-style system (dynamic pricing) and locking prices for the sale, Swift made the profit from each ticket obvious.
• His math: about 15% of a stadium show's tickets are premium, roughly 10,000 per Eras show, or about 1.5 million premium tickets across the tour at $450, about $675 million at face value. Floor seats resold for close to $4,000 on average and some topped $10,000, so those seats were really worth about $3 billion to $5 billion. Anyone who got a ticket could "10x your money, no questions asked."

[7:31] Bots and Scalping

• Phil buys Eagles vs. Raiders tickets in Philadelphia by the rules (captchas, no automated software, no rapid refreshing, no hitting more than a thousand pages). It takes about three minutes.
• Those rules come from Ticketmaster's lawsuit against Prestige Entertainment, which he calls the most notorious U.S. scalper, said to buy hundreds of tickets a second with bots. It reportedly got 40% of the tickets when Hamilton first went to Broadway (he says 2017) and about half the tickets to the 2015 Pacquiao vs. Mayweather fight. The case, later settled, says 10 unnamed people made thousands of verified accounts and bought 300,000 tickets in two years.
• A bot is just code that convinces a ticketing site it's a normal person. Scalpers need at least four kinds: account creation, scanning sites for availability and presale codes, getting through queues (where the most resistance is), and checkout.
• The hard part is location. Ticketmaster blocks requests that come from data centers, so bots have to look like they come from real homes. Services like Bright Data sell routes through about 150 million real household connections, so a bot's request passes through someone's house before reaching Ticketmaster.
• Bright Data gets many of those homes from Hola VPN (captioned "OlaVPN"), a free VPN whose users agree to let their connection carry other traffic. Phil's example is a U.S. user reaching French Netflix through another user's computer in France. Hola resells that access, so free Hola users' devices end up relaying scalpers' requests. "Ethics aside," Phil calls it a very clever business model.

[11:41] Price Controls

• Bots and scalping are a gray area at minimum, and price controls make it worth finding loopholes. The bigger the prize, whether from limited supply or limited price, the bigger the underground market that grows to serve it.
• Drugs are the clearest case: a ban works like a price control set at "jail time," and the global trade is worth about $1 trillion a year.
• New York City rent control: landlords cut maintenance and demand big deposits, builders avoid rent-controlled areas, and lucky tenants sublet at market rates.
• Nixon's 1970s gas price cap during the Middle East oil embargo led to long lines, gas theft and black markets, and refineries with no reason to produce more. A clip adds: "you get what you reward for... if you have a dumb incentive system, you get dumb outcomes." Phil allows that some things shouldn't be for sale, but says caps show what happens.
• At SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles, where Swift added a sixth night, upper seats sold for about $100, mid-level for $250, and floor for $450, then resold for $1,160, $2,400, and $4,650. Across the tour, buying at Swift's prices and relisting on sites like StubHub produced over $1 billion in profit.
• It wouldn't have mattered whether Ticketmaster, Amazon, a crypto marketplace, or a startup ran the sale; the price cap created the incentive. Ticketmaster's alternatives were dynamic pricing (letting the first sale price follow demand), banning resale with ID checks at the gate, or allowing resale only on Ticketmaster's own marketplace, which artists reject because it gives Ticketmaster more power.

[14:43] Will Live Nation and Ticketmaster Be Broken Up?

• The Department of Justice wants courts to break up Live Nation, Ticketmaster's parent. Clips call the merger illegal and Live Nation-Ticketmaster "a very traditional monopoly." Phil suggests politicians will say whatever wins over Swift's fans.
• The DOJ complaint says the company used anti-competitive conduct to dominate the live concert market. It has two businesses: Live Nation's venue side, which owns or controls about 300 North American venues including the Fillmore and House of Blues, and Ticketmaster, which sells tickets for those and thousands of other venues and events.
• Phil calls "live concerts" a narrow market definition. Across all live events there's competition: SeatGeek won the Dallas Cowboys and other teams and powers Broadway and festival ticketing, and AEG tickets Crypto.com Arena in L.A. and the O2 in London. The U.S. has more than 2,500 music venues, and Live Nation controls about 300.
• Most important, he says, Live Nation's concert business has never turned a profit. Only Ticketmaster makes money, and without it, some of Live Nation's dozens of festivals would likely stop and its well-reviewed venues could get worse. Concerts, festivals, and promotion are capital-intensive, with decades of bankruptcies behind them, so concert prices would at minimum have to rise.

[17:03] Summary

• Outrage at Ticketmaster was predictable. Like airlines, high-profile consumer businesses draw social media anger whenever an experience goes wrong, even when they aren't huge or very profitable.
• The real friction is money. Artists see none of the scalpers' resale profit, and they hate the fees: a $100 ticket becomes $135 at checkout, which hurts demand (like how free shipping encourages buying), but cutting the face price to $65 to hit $100 costs them $35 a ticket.
• "Ticketmaster has just become the new record company," and since artists never got along with labels either, that tension is here to stay.
• Will the company be broken up? Phil thinks it's unlikely, and he says the stock market and betting markets agree. He signs off joking that his ticket-scalping business is "absolutely booming."

2) Things mentioned

Economics and policy ideas

• Recorded-music economics: a $16 CD in 1999 (about $31 today), about 15 cents of every album dollar going to the artist, and streaming's collapse of that model.
• Touring as primary income: concert ticket prices up 175% while unlimited streaming costs about $130 a year.
• Price controls / price ceilings: Swift's $49 to $449 range as a cap below market value.
• Dynamic pricing: Ticketmaster's recommended auction-style pricing that moves with demand.
• Arbitrage and resale markets: about 1.5 million premium tickets ($675 million face) really worth $3 billion to $5 billion, and over $1 billion in total resale profit.
• Incentives and black markets: "the bigger the prize... the bigger an underground operation will grow."
• Drug prohibition as a price control: a global trade of about $1 trillion a year.
• New York City rent control: less maintenance, big deposits, less building, and illegal sublets.
• Nixon-era gas price caps (1970s oil embargo): gas lines, theft, and no reason for refineries to produce more.
• Antitrust and market definition: live concerts versus all live events; about 300 of 2,500+ U.S. music venues.
• Cross-subsidy: profitable Ticketmaster funding Live Nation's never-profitable concert business.
• Drip/checkout fees: a $100 face price becoming $135, and the free-shipping comparison.
• Market signals: the stock market and betting markets both doubting a breakup.

Companies, organizations, and products

• Ticketmaster: the ticketing platform at the center of the Eras Tour presale.
• Live Nation Entertainment: Ticketmaster's parent and concert promoter, owner or operator of about 300 venues.
• The Fillmore and House of Blues: Live Nation venue brands.
• StubHub: the resale marketplace where Eras tickets listed for $5,000 to $30,000.
• Prestige Entertainment: the scalping operation Ticketmaster sued, later settling.
• Bright Data: the residential-proxy network routing traffic through about 150 million homes.
• Hola VPN: the free VPN whose users' connections feed residential proxy networks.
• Netflix: the region-unlocking example for VPNs.
• SeatGeek: competitor ticketing the Dallas Cowboys, Broadway shows, and festivals.
• AEG: competitor ticketing Crypto.com Arena (Los Angeles) and the O2 (London).
• Napster, iTunes, and Spotify: the shift from albums to downloads to streaming.
• Christie's: the auction house that sold Salvator Mundi.
• Amazon and crypto marketplaces: Phil's examples of other sellers that would have faced the same bot rush.
• U.S. Department of Justice: the antitrust suit seeking to break up Live Nation and Ticketmaster.
• Airlines: the comparison for outrage at consumer-facing businesses.

Events, venues, and works

• The Eras Tour: 152 shows over two years per the video, with the presale on November 15, 2022 at 10:00 a.m.
• Ed Sheeran's Divide tour: 260 shows, the previous highest-grossing tour.
• SoFi Stadium, Los Angeles: Swift's six nights, and the resale prices Phil quotes.
• Salvator Mundi (Leonardo da Vinci): sold at Christie's in 2017 for a $400 million hammer price (about $450 million with fees).
• Mona Lisa: cited as da Vinci's more famous work.
• Hamilton (Broadway): Prestige reportedly got 40% of the opening tickets.
• Pacquiao vs. Mayweather (2015): Prestige reportedly got about half the tickets.
• Philadelphia Eagles vs. Las Vegas Raiders: the game Phil buys tickets for by the rules.
• Dallas Cowboys: SeatGeek's ticketing client.
• The 1999 CD: the 15-song album Phil uses for the price comparison.

Technology

• Ticket bots: account-creation, scanning/presale-code, queue, and checkout bots.
• Data-center IP blocking and residential proxies: how scalpers make bot traffic look like it comes from homes.
• VPNs: how they mask location, and how free tiers resell users' bandwidth.
• Captchas and site-usage rules: the limits from the Ticketmaster vs. Prestige case.

3) Biographies

Phil Andrews (presenter)

Phil Andrews is the producer and on-camera host of Maxinomics ("the guy in the videos and the comments"), a channel that explains economics, business, and geopolitics through stories and on-location segments. Here he films at an empty Los Angeles stadium, buys NFL tickets on camera, and closes by joking about his own scalping business.

Taylor Swift (subject)

Taylor Swift (born 1989) is an American singer-songwriter and one of the best-selling musicians of all time. Her Eras Tour (2023–2024) became the highest-grossing concert tour in history. After the November 2022 Ticketmaster presale failure, she publicly criticized the process, and the meltdown led to U.S. Senate hearings on ticketing competition. The video argues her decision to cap prices and reject dynamic pricing made the scalping rush inevitable.

Ed Sheeran (mentioned)

Ed Sheeran (born 1991) is an English singer-songwriter. His Divide tour (2017–2019) set the record for the highest-grossing concert tour until the Eras Tour passed it.

Leonardo da Vinci (mentioned)

Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) was the Italian Renaissance painter, engineer, and inventor behind the Mona Lisa. Salvator Mundi, a painting of Christ attributed to him, resurfaced in 2005 and in 2017 became the most expensive painting ever sold at auction.

Christie's auctioneer (archival)

The auctioneer heard taking the Salvator Mundi bids isn't named in the video. Christie's 2017 sale was conducted by Jussi Pylkkänen, then the house's global president.

Richard Nixon (mentioned)

Richard Nixon (1913–1994) was the 37th U.S. president (1969–1974). His administration's wage and price controls, including caps on oil and gasoline prices around the 1973 Arab oil embargo, are Phil's example of a price ceiling causing shortages and lines.

Incentives clip speaker (archival)

The speaker saying "you get what you reward for... dumb incentive system, dumb outcomes" isn't identified in the video. The idea echoes investor Charlie Munger's well-known line about incentives, but the clip isn't attributed on screen.

Production credits

Producer Phil Andrews; video editor Greg Jacobs; motion graphics by Seth Laupus; director of production services Sam Wolf; thumbnail by Tom Grillo; franchise content producer Tariq Abdellatif; chief content officer Devin Emery.