When Taylor Swift's Eras Tour presales opened on Nov. 15, 2022, Ticketmaster's site crashed within minutes. A new case study argues the technical failure was the smaller problem. The bigger one: how the company communicated — or didn't.

Dane Kiambi, associate professor of advertising and public relations at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and a 13-year veteran of crisis communications teaching, published the case study in Corporate Communications: An International Journal. It dissects the period from Nov. 15, 2022, to Jan. 24, 2023, when Live Nation President Joe Berchtold testified before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee. Kiambi also analyzed social media reactions and press coverage from Nov. 15–19, 2022, the window when public sentiment shifted most sharply.

His verdict is blunt.

"When crisis communications are done well, they stay hidden, but when it goes wrong, it's visible everywhere, and Ticketmaster did everything wrong," Kiambi said.

The stakes outlasted the news cycle. The reputational damage fed into the U.S. Department of Justice's antitrust case against Live Nation. A settlement was announced March 9, but more than two dozen state attorneys general have rejected it, and continued negative coverage keeps the reputational wound open.

What the textbook says — and what Ticketmaster did

Kiambi built his analysis on Situational Crisis Communication Theory, the dominant framework for reputational crisis management. Ticketmaster, he found, violated it at nearly every turn.

"Number one, they did not respond very quickly. They were not proactive; they were reactive," Kiambi said. "It was not until the ticket sale completely collapsed that they started issuing a statement, and it was a halfhearted statement."

The missteps compounded. The company deleted a blog post. It repeatedly blamed bots. It reminded everyone how well it had handled high-demand events in the past — a move that reads as self-congratulation while fans sat in broken queues.

"What could have been a technical issue crisis, it arose to become scandal," Kiambi said. "They were not being genuine in the conversations with the public. They avoided taking full responsibility and didn't establish next steps, or corrective action — how will we keep this from happening again. There was a lack of transparency, and that shows there was something they were hiding."

That opaqueness had a measurable cost. "Every new Ticketmaster deflection became fresh material (for the press), and the endless reporting kept public anger alive long enough for it to attract regulatory attention."

The pivot point practitioners should note

Kiambi's media analysis shows public sentiment shifted from "systems fail" to "this was preventable." Questions about whether Live Nation, Ticketmaster's parent company, operated as a monopoly became a chorus. Collective disbelief set in: how could a company this large not have seen it coming?

"Once the perception of the public shifted to 'this was preventable,' Ticketmaster should have treated the crisis differently, issued a full apology and considered some type of compensation," Kiambi said.

They didn't. Instead, Berchtold went to Congress, faced tough questions, and — in Kiambi's reading — evaded responsibility while bragging about ticket volumes. "That led to the lawsuit, because Congress said 'we have to break this up.'"

The case study identifies a specific moment when the response should have changed. "As soon as the very first social media posts appeared that put the blame on the organization, they needed to make a full apology, take full responsibility, be transparent about what happened and offer some kind of corrective action and compensation," Kiambi said.

His closing instruction for anyone holding the pager: "Don't wait for Taylor Swift to come out and give a statement three days later saying she is frustrated and unhappy. Be proactive, admit the mistake and state how you are fixing it."

Swift herself apologized to fans and demanded accountability during the meltdown — an extraordinary inversion, with the artist doing the crisis communication the platform wouldn't.

From classroom to journal

The study has academic origins worth noting. Katie Zabel, a student in one of Kiambi's courses, flagged the Swift–Ticketmaster debacle in an assignment as a textbook example of what companies should not do. She is now a co-author on the study. Kiambi plans to fold the case into his curriculum to drive discussion of what Ticketmaster should have done differently — and why every organization needs a crisis communications plan before it needs one.

For communications practitioners, the case is a compact checklist of failure modes: slow response, reactive posture, halfhearted apologies, deleted content, blame-shifting to bots, legacy bragging, no corrective action, no compensation. Pick any one and the remedy is obvious in hindsight. The lesson is that the remedy was obvious in foresight too — the theory was there, published and waiting. Ticketmaster just didn't use it.