Taylor’s ticket troubles

Hailey Steidle, Contributing writer

On Nov. 1, Taylor Swift swept the world again when she announced a stadium tour for the United States. The Swift’s Eras Tour is going to take place over the course of 6 months from March to August of 2023, spanning a total of 30 concerts in 20 different cities. Tickets were announced to cost $49-$499 for standard tickets and $199-$899 for VIP passes. It was then announced that the first tickets being sold would go to a select group of individuals known as “verified fans” on Ticketmaster’s website on Nov. 15. The issues with the sale began when the amount of “verified fans” went from a select few individuals to a million. On the day of the sale, roughly 3.5 billion total system requests made their way to Ticketmasters site, this would mean it was four times the site’s previous all time high.As fans with presale codes waited in the randomly generated queue for hours at a time, they could see seats filling up in the stadiums they had codes for in front of them. At the same time, they saw the seats filling they saw the same tickets being posted on resale sites like StubHub for upwards of 10 times the original amount. Tour dates like the March 17 opening night in Glendale, Arizona have tickets being listed for as much as $17,010 for floor seats. Floor seats for Atlanta, Georgia on April 28 are listed for as much as $35,438. The MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, NJ have prices of up to $21,600 per seat. The lowest ticket price available on StubHub is $350 which barely gets you in the door of the stadiums. After the sale many fans did not even get the chance or opportunity to purchase tickets because Ticketmaster announced that they would be canceling public sales due to selling too many seats in the “verified fans” presale. They also said that the site itself would not be able to withstand the demand of general sales. After facing backlash, Ticketmaster made a statement saying that more than 3.5 million people had signed up for the “verified fans” program, which was the largest registration in history, causing the site to slow down and almost crash entirely. Due to Ticketmaster’s miscalculations on how many people were allowed into the presale, many fans never even got the chance to purchase a ticket after waiting hours in an online queue. It was later announced that over 2 million tickets were sold in one day, making it the most tickets ever sold in a single day. Companies like Ticketmaster and StubHub along with scalpers have made this tour and many others inaccessible to many fans. This leaves a risk of there being many potential seats available at concerts with no opportunities to fill them because fans cannot afford the outrageous ticket prices. A lot of fans are rightfully outraged that massive companies who do this every day are letting this happen. Fans can only wait and hope that ticket prices on websites like StubHub lower before the concerts.