Taylor Swift Ticket Debacle

On November 1st, singer/songwriter Taylor Swift wrote, “I’m enchanted to announce my next tour: Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour, a journey through the musical eras of my career (past and present!),” via her Instagram. 

Fans were elated and ready to dish out cash for Taylor’s Swift’s first tour since her “Reputation Era” tour. Taylors Swift’s “Lover Era” tour was canceled due to the pandemic, leaving lots of fans who had not gotten to see her in several years restless.

Swift announced that she would be selling her tickets on Ticketmaster, a site that had issues in the past. Swift planned to do a presale on Nov 15, a Capital One presale on Nov 16, and general admission later in the afternoon on the 17th.

To access the presale, one had to get a code sent via email. Ticketmaster assumed that only 40% of people with presale codes would log on to buy tickets, causing them to give out 1.5 million codes; Way over the amount of tickets that were available. 

Ticketmaster also allowed people without codes to still access the queue. Even with Ticketmaster’s knowledge of the amount of fans wanting to buy tickets, the site still crashed multiple times. 

Another issue is that many fans’ presale codes were not working and not allowing them to purchase tickets. The site ended up having so many issues that Ticketmaster paused the queue for approximately two hours.

Despite all this, however, some fans still had hope of getting tickets through the Capital One presale. But alas, Ticketmaster had sold too many tickets during the presale, and there were no tickets left.

The lack of tickets caused the general sale to also be canceled. People looking to buy tickets referred to this event as the “great war” based on the title of her song with the same name.Only 5% of people who tried to get tickets succeeded. 

Although many fans were enraged and looking to Swift for answers, it took her a while to come out with a statement. 

“Well. It goes without saying that I’m extremely protective of my fans,” she wrote in a statement posted Friday in her Instagram Stories. “We’ve been doing this for decades together and over the years, I’ve brought so many elements of my career in house. I’ve done this SPECIFICALLY to improve the quality of my fans’ experience by doing it myself with my team who care as much about my fans as I do.” Swift posts.

Taylor Swift goes as far as to say that her fans went through “bear attacks” to get tickets. 

While Swift’s apology was accepted by many, some fans are looking for action behind the words.