Taylor Swift ticket sales should be decentralized. Blockchain can make it possible.

Views expressed in opinion columns are the author’s own.

The final Taylor Swift tour has finally arrived. Swifties all over the world have been dying to see Swift on her upcoming exclusive The Eras Tour. However, what was supposed to be a grand event has soured as many fans had challenges with buying tickets.

A single, large ticket supplier, Ticketmaster, has absolute control over the sale of first-hand tickets for the tour due to exclusive offers it has with concert promoter Live Nation. Fans also have to deal with scalpers who create robots to buy tickets en masse to resell at a profit on the second-hand ticket market. These bots not only increased ticket prices, but also contributed to high traffic, which caused website to crash and prevent Swifties from getting tickets.

I’m tired of seeing scalpers and big ticket providers reap fortunes while fans either overpay or miss out on tickets. Furthermore, these ticket providers get artists, comedians and sports teams – the people we actually buy tickets to support – to lose on part of the profit.

While any solution should begin with antitrust laws to prevent the practice of ticket vendors having exclusive contracts with venues, which sounds too much like monopolies to me, that’s just the beginning of what the government needs to do to fix the broken event ticketing system.

To make a lasting improvement in the event ticketing industry, we can decentralize ticketing by implementing blockchain systems to process and manage ticketing. This will alleviate concerns about counterfeit tickets and make the ticketing experience for hosts and consumers much more seamless. Using the blockchain to manage ticket sales will also prevent large corporations from monopolizing the ticketing industry.

Before a decentralized ticketing system can become mainstream, the government must step in and ban contracts with exclusive venues. Ticketmaster has created exclusive offers to ensure that it is the only company that can sell tickets for events at certain venues. The arenas take advantage of the marketing Ticketmaster offers and bring in top performers to increase stadium revenue.

This tactic is inherently monopolistic because its sole purpose is to ensure that no other supplier is able to sell tickets at certain venues. Additionally, because Ticketmaster has agreements with larger venues, many performers must partner with them because smaller, non-Ticketmaster affiliated venues cannot accommodate the high demand for seats.

This trick Ticketmaster uses is not new and it is part of the origins of the antitrust laws in America. During the Gilded Age, Standard Oil made agreements with railways for reduced shipping costs to destroy competitors. Finally, the government stepped in, slap Standard Oil and similar businesses with antitrust laws to break them up.

We cannot allow the ticketing market to continue to succumb to the tactics of monopolistic corporations, which rob Americans of the concept of a free market. Like the US Department of Justice begins to investigate Ticketmaster and Live Nationour antitrust laws must be quickly enforced to break up the monopoly Ticketmaster has over the event industry.

But when Ticketmaster is gone, a new system must be put in place that prevents a single company from strangling the market. Artists and venues implementing blockchain technology in event tickets is an idea that is slowly gaining traction.

It might be strange to hear blockchain technology being used outside of cryptocurrency, but really blockchain is just a digital ledger that stores records and transactions in a way that can ensure integrity of the data.

Because blockchain itself is decentralized, an artist selling to customers does not need to rely on a company like Ticketmaster to handle the sales of their tickets. Instead, when a ticket is purchased, it is encrypted and placed in the ledger.

Each ticket can be identified by a telephone number, and any change in the status of a ticketfor example a used sale, would be easy to verify. Counterfeit tickets would essentially cease to exist, as an unverified sale would not be entered in the ledger.

This technology will greatly improve competition in the market and it will allow artists to reclaim their rightful income from these ticket companies.

It’s time to stop letting Ticketmaster be a middleman that doesn’t need to exist. All these companies are doing is creating an unnecessary wall between artists and fans. The DOJ’s probe should effectively break up Ticketmaster, but to stop any other shady company from taking its place, we need to leverage decentralized blockchain technology.

Ravi Panguluri is a sophomore computer science and statistics major. He can be reached at [email protected].