The Taylor ticket tragedy

Taylor Swift has been one of my favorite artists since I was little. The first song my cousin introduced to me was called “Never Grow Up.” When her album “Reputation” came out, I really wanted to see her in concert. I even wrote an email to her “manager” asking them to spare two tickets for my friend and me. Unfortunately, I’m still waiting for a response from her team.

When “Midnights” came out on Oct. 21. and the Eras tour was announced, I did not know how hard it would be to get tickets. 

The first presale for tickets went live on Ticketmaster on Nov. 15 at 10 a.m. That’s when the drama began. There was a surge in demand causing Ticketmaster to have long waits, glitches, and queuing problems. This led to millions of angry fans leaving the site with no tickets in hand. 

My mom tried to get through the website to get a presale code, and she managed to do so but every time there would be a wait, and the site said there were no longer tickets available.  Ticketmaster claimed in a blog post that only an estimated 15% of customers had any problems with the site, but many Swifties said differently, leading Ticketmaster to remove the post and update the reasoning over why this happened. 

At this point, my friend and I made a plan. For the public on-sale on Friday, Nov. 18 at 10 a.m.,  we were both going to go on, and if one of us got through we would buy the maximum amount of six tickets. I thought we really had a chance. We did not really know what to expect when it came to the price of tickets though, and most likely we wouldn’t be able to afford them. 

Later that week, Ticketmaster canceled the general sale which was supposed to go live Friday, Nov. 18 at 10 a.m. This decision was due to the high demand for tickets and potentially not having enough inventory to meet that extraordinary demand. After they announced the cancellation I went on and started researching all the things that had happened and I was shocked and disappointed. A lot of fans were hoping to still have the chance to buy tickets for the general sale and found the cancellation unfair. 

This event timeline has focused a lot of hate on Ticketmaster, the parent company to Live Nation, for charging high fees and profiting from their monopoly over the online ticket industry. Artists selling tickets for their shows have a say in how tickets are sold and priced, so Taylor Swift does play a role here too. There could be other ways tickets could have been sold, but she didn’t choose them. Swift has never said anything about it, but she apparently did opt out of dynamic pricing which calculates the price of tickets upon how many tickets are in demand. This system can fluctuate prices to thousands of dollars per seat because of high demand. 

That Friday night Swift posted on Instagram to give her side of the story. She wrote, “There are a multitude of reasons why people had such a hard time trying to get tickets and I’m trying to figure out how this situation can be improved moving forward.” She seemed upset over the situation but after this post, nothing else has been said. 

After learning more about how high-demand concert tickets are sold online, I hope there will be ways to prevent such things from happening in the future if I try to get tickets to a concert I would enjoy going to without having to go through stress trying to actually be able to get tickets. 

I hope something can be done to improve the process for buying high-demand concert tickets online. Purchasing high demand tickets can be challenging for fans when the whole experience is about the fans, the performance and the artist. It is disappointing when you are expecting to obtain tickets for a very popular artist you really want to see and not having easy access to these tickets. 
Resale tickets for the Eras tour are as high as $8,000 on Vividseats, and $6,000 on StubHub. Some fans saw some being sold for as high as $22,000. Average fans cannot afford these prices. TicketMaster makes approximately $11.9 billion each year, and the average fees for the Eras tour took up 28% of the value of a single ticket. With that kind of profit, surely something can be done.

Mattlee Scott

Junior Mattlee Scott was a former staff writer for BluePrints Magazine. She has various career interests including psychology.

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