Not even King Charles III's coronation can escape a Ticketmaster debacle

It doesn’t matter if you’re Taylor Swift, Bad Bunny, The Cure, or the literal King of England; Ticketmaster will find a way to muck up your big day. Over the past few years, the ticketing platform has been an anvil in the side of the already-floundering live performance industry, inundating fans with extra fees, increasing ticket prices post-purchase or charging for tickets that never arrive, and bowing to the whims of scalpers who jack prices up by thousands of dollars.

The most recent famous figure to catch some strays in the proletariat war against fat cat industry ruler Ticketmaster, ironically enough, is King Charles III, whose upcoming coronation has been ticketed through the platform. Handling ticketing for the United Kingdom’s first coronation in over 70 years makes for no small feat, and in characteristic fashion, Ticketmaster fumbled the bag and left aspiring attendees frustrated and confused.

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According to the Royal Family’s website, twenty thousand tickets to the May 7 event—set to feature performances from Andrea Bocelli, Lionel Richie, Katy Perry, and more—were made available by public ballot in pairs. Applications for the ballot closed on February 28, and selection was reportedly “based on the geographical spread of the U.K. population, and not on a first-come first-served basis.” (Read: as long as an application makes it in before the deadline, it has the same chance of selection as the first application submitted.)

Although on paper the ticketing plan makes sense, in practice it wasn’t so simple. Many people complained that emails they received congratulating them on being selected via random ballot were misleading. One Twitter user, Wallingford, England resident Laura Wood, shared a screenshot on April 25 of an email she received inviting her to select tickets for the coronation—she says that when she clicked on the link, all the tickets were long gone.

In the replies, a bevy of users with similar stories also lamented Ticketmaster’s inutility, with user Carolyn Parry emphasizing how the system was especially inefficient for those trying to purchase accessible tickets. Countless other users had similar stories or email screenshots; some even said their emails had informed them they had until April 27 to claim tickets, which led them to believe their tickets would not be reallocated to other users until that point. Ticketmaster did not immediately respond to The A.V. Club’s request for comment.

Despite historic tensions between the U.K. and U.S. (who could forget the Boston Tea Party or the Obama-era fever dream that was Hamilton), Ticketmaster’s practices seem to be a concern the two sovereign countries can unite behind. Back in January, a Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing “to examine the lack of competition in the ticketing industry,” spurred by the expensive, tear-jerking dumpster fire that was ticketing for Taylor Swift’s Eras tour. On Wednesday, Senators Amy Klobuchar and Richard Blumenthal introduced the proposed “Unlock Ticketing Markets Act,” which “would help restore competition to live event ticketing markets” by empowering the Federal Trade Commission to put a stoppage to multi-year exclusive contracts between platforms like Ticketmaster and venues.

“Consumers deserve protection against the clear excesses and abuses of Ticketmaster repeatedly demonstrated in their own lives and documented in Congressional hearings,” Blumenthal shared in a statement. “This legislation is a step toward basic fairness that everyone deserves - consumers, artists, venues, and others - against a sad and repugnant history of putting its profits above them.”

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