Taylor Swift BREAKS Ticketmaster

Ever since the recent release of Midnights by Taylor Swift back in late October, fans have been ecstatic about new “content” coming from Swift with rumors surrounding a potential tour. Then, on November 1st, Taylor Swift’s 2023 The Era’s Tour was announced to the public with fans eager to see Swift in concert for the first time in nearly five years, her last tour being the reputation Stadium Tour (May 8, 2018 – November 21, 2018), which would follow Swift’s ten albums and their so-called “eras”. 

However, the public was hesitant when it was announced that Ticketmaster, a website notorious for selling tickets for many titles and venues, was in charge of handling the sales. This includes the ticket presale and the distribution of presale codes to what the site named “Verified Fans” as a way of getting a headcount of fans looking to purchase tickets. By doing so, fans of Swift would register on the Ticketmaster website or app to become a “Ticketmaster Verified Fan”. On the evening before the presale, November 14, selected fans would get an email or text with a code, confirming participation in the presale. 

Fans were reluctant to this news due to Ticketmaster’s past issues of alleged overcharging and overall unreliability regarding ticket sales. “I think the Verified Fan system was a good strategy to find loyal fans that deserve tickets, but they allowed way too many people to sign up and receive codes that needed to buy tickets”, says Senior Samantha Cook, a fan of Taylor Swift.

On November 15, the big day arrived. Around 1.5 million fans who had received a code the night before were ecstatic to buy tickets off the TaylorSwiftTix Presale, and the other 2 million weren’t so lucky. While those who didn’t receive codes were put on a waiting list for the slight chance to get the remaining tickets, holding out hope for Friday’s general public sale, fans with codes were quick to buy their tickets, with many staying home from school or work in order to make their purchase. “I took the day off of school,” Cook states, “and it took 5 hours, but I got the tickets.” 

As many fans waited in the online queue for hours, the website crashed on numerous occasions, with many saying they were kicked out of the queue and having to start all over again, which frustrated many people. Large quantities of bots and fans without codes had tried to make their purchases as well, despite not having a Verified Fan code, which had contributed to the website’s crash. It was an overall stressful situation for Taylor Swift fans, code or no code. 

“The situation makes me feel awful. It was so unfair and it was putting all these fans, who have this one thing that brings them together, against each other. It was such a stressful situation and it was a lose-lose-lose,” says Freshman Alice Bell, another fan of Taylor Swift. “This made me kind of confused with Ticketmaster because they acted like their system was perfect, but it kept breaking, and Taylor released a statement and was saying that this wasn’t the ideal situation, but Ticketmaster was just freaking out”. 

“Ticketmaster was in control of how many people they were allowed on their website, prices, etc, but they still messed up. They said there was an “unprecedented demand” for tickets but they decided how many people would be allowed on the website, so it is solely their fault. Swift asked Ticketmaster prior if they could handle the demand and they vowed that they could, but came up short. Ticketmaster is at fault”, Cook states. 

In the end, all of the 2 million tickets for the Verified Fan onsale were sold to only Verified Fans, with 2.4 million being sold for the tour overall across the scale with the Verified Fan and Capital One cardholder, being on both SeatGeek and Ticketmaster. “Personally, the situation has made me more aware of what goes on behind the scenes at big monopoly businesses like Ticketmaster. They were deceitful not only to the fans, but Taylor herself, so I feel bad for all those affected.” Cook adds.

Ticketmaster responded to the situation, stating, “Even when a high demand onsale goes flawlessly from a tech perspective, many fans are left empty-handed. For example: Based on the volume of traffic to our site, Taylor would need to perform over 900 stadium shows (almost 20x the number of shows she is doing)…that’s a stadium show every single night for the next 2.5 years. While it’s impossible for everyone to get tickets to these shows, we know we can do more to improve the experience and that’s what we’re focused on.” 

As of now, Ticketmaster, and its parent company, Live Action, are under investigation and sued by numerous fans for a “class-action” lawsuit and fraud, misrepresentation, and antitrust violations over the November 15th presale.