On November 1st, Taylor Swift announced on “Good Morning America” that she would be going on tour, for the first time in almost five years. The tour is called “The Eras tour.” The tour will cover all of her albums from 2006 to now. In Swift’s description of the tour she writes, “This is a journey throughout the musical journeys of my career (past and present)!” She will be touring all 10 of her albums. She had just released her 10th studio album called “Midnights,” so this will be a perfect time to promote her new album (Pallotta).
That day, fans had the opportunity to register for a chance to get a presale for the tour. The presale granted them access to get tickets before the general public could get them, giving them a better chance to get tickets to the popular event. Fans ended up waiting in line for nearly five hours just to register for pre-sales, which was not a guarantee. This speaks to the high demand for the concert. Usually, for a less famous artist, it takes twenty minutes at most for a fan to register. If the fan does not get selected for presale, they will be put on a waiting list to get tickets during the regular sale. Ticketmaster assured fans that they would be informed the night before the presale if they were selected (Taylor).
At 10:00 AM, the queue opened and tickets went on sale. Ticketmaster tweeted right before the presale that demand for the tour was historic and records would be broken, so things might take a little longer than usual.
Ten minutes into tickets going on sale, Ticketmaster completely crashed and broke, which has never happened. Fans were confused about why they were not moving in line for a long period of time, up to two hours. The line was paused because people that were in the seating chart could not purchase tickets due to Ticketmaster’s repeated crashes. Finally, after almost two hours on the line, the queue started to move for some fans, but others were still paused. The whole process lasted about 6 hours. Additionally, Capital One sponsored this tour, so they were having a sale exclusive to Capital One cardholders. The Capital One sale got delayed two days since Ticketmaster kept crashing.
After the Ticketmaster sale, fans were outraged. Ticketmaster did not accommodate the demand for tickets. Ticketmaster knew that this tour would break records, and they were still not prepared for the demand. Ticketmaster claimed that they gave out only two million presale codes, but sixteen million people went on the website which is why the website crashed.
A couple days later Taylor Swift released a statement saying “I’m not going to make excuses for anyone. We asked them multiple times if they could handle this kind of demand, and we were assured they could.” She expressed her frustration about her fans having so much trouble getting tickets and to the fans that weren’t able to get tickets.
Right now, the tickets are sold out on Ticketmaster and are only on the secondary market for extreme prices going up to $50,000. Hopefully moving forward Taylor and her team will give fans some closure for this and to get more tickets in the hands of real fans and not resellers.
