Ticketmaster president says queue placements aren’t randomized despite previous claims, but it’s still not giving us music fans the explanation we deserve

Ticketmaster has found itself in yet another catastrophic sinkhole thanks to its president, who just dropped a massive bombshell about positions in queues.

For years, music fans have been told that queue placements on Ticketmaster are randomized to give everyone a chance at scoring tickets to see their favorite artists. It turns out that the live music behemoth has been lying to our faces.

A conversation on X between Ticketmaster president Saumil Mehta and fan account @lexs_version sparked this, where Mehta replied to the latter’s complaints about queue positions, claiming that he ‘doesn’t know where this notion that queue positions are random came from’. You can read his full reply below.

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According to Mehta, no such claim had been made by him or anyone at Ticketmaster, but he very quickly met his match when a slurry of accounts pulled up a 2018 post shared by the official Ticketmaster account page explicitly stating that queue placements are randomly assigned (see below). Mehta has gone radio silent ever since, leaving us without an explanation.

This has sparked a new burning question: if Ticketmaster doesn’t randomize queue placements and it doesn’t matter what time you join the online waiting room, what criteria is Ticketmaster using to determine queue numbers?

The hole is only getting deeper

In the original X post that started it all, the user addressed the patterns in their waiting line positions when trying to purchase tickets for Ariana Grande’s Eternal Sunshine Tour, claiming that they were placed around the 80,000 mark in every queue they joined. When they tried this on a separate account, every waiting room they joined placed them around the 20,000 mark — resulting in an oddly consistent pattern of placements.

However, this is just one example, and apparently, these consistent queue placements are a common occurrence for a lot of people. This has opened a widespread investigation among music fans who are now pinning it down to one theory: account activity.

This has led users to believe that accounts with higher activity tend to score lower-numbered placements in Ticketmaster’s waiting line, giving them a better chance at purchasing tickets. For example, one user believes that the reason they’ve managed to buy multiple tickets for a single tour is because they use their account to transfer out every ticket they buy to those who are attending the show with them.

Now, music fans are even more convinced that the company has been prioritizing scalpers and resellers all along because, if we’re basing this on account activity, accounts designed to scam others would need to spend a lot of time purchasing tickets and then going back through Ticketmaster to list them for resale, where they can get away with charging way above face value.

As a result, it means that Ticketmaster can potentially make more money on resale fees, while genuine music fans are left having to pay exorbitant prices on resale tickets, or spend money on VIP tickets and other exclusive packages — a.k.a: the types of tickets that are usually the only ones that are left because of their low demand.

It’s still just a theory, and Mehta has neither confirmed nor denied if this is the case, but the longer Mehta stays silent, the more agitated and demanding customers become.

Ticketmaster has been under intense scrutiny since the Eras Tour fiasco, and it hasn’t been long since Ticketmaster’s parent, Live Nation, was deemed an illegal monopoly — so Mehta’s apparent slip-up really is the icing on the cake.