Jenarita Plante
Anchor Staff Writer
Millions of Taylor Swift fans on Tuesday anxiously counted down the seconds until Ticketmaster opened their presale for Swift’s upcoming Eras Tour. The tour begins March 17 and will take over five months traveling through 52 stadiums. Surely, there would be plenty of seats for everyone, right?
Very early into the presale, it was easy to see the Swiftie pandemonium that was going on. Fans were sitting in que rooms with over 2,000 people ahead of them. Some fans waited there for more than half the day before finally giving up, others couldn’t even get onto the platform with their early access code. Those that purchased the tickets didn’t know if their sale actually went through as they waited for an email confirmation. Social media was buzzing, and fans were getting frustrated.
The frustration continued as the announcement came on Thursday that due to unprecedented sales, the general public sale slated for Friday would be canceled. Ticketmaster claimed that there were no more tickets left to be sold.
Swift issued her response to all of this debacle on Friday morning stating, “I’m not going to make excuses for anyone because we asked them, multiple times, if they could handle this kind of demand and we were assured they could. It’s truly amazing that 2.4 million people got tickets, but it really pisses me off that a lot of them feel like they went through several bear attacks to get them.”
Her response let fans know that she stood with them, felt their pain and was not at all pleased with the way things were handled.
Ticketmaster issued an apology to Swift and her fans late Friday night. Like her song, “Anti-Hero,” they admitted, “I’m the problem, it’s me” when stating, “We strive to make ticket buying as easy as possible for fans, but that hasn’t been the case for many people trying to buy tickets for Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour.”
The ticket-issuing giant claimed that an unprecedented amount of traffic on the site was to blame for the many issues. Normally, only 40% of those invited to the presale show up. Over 3.5 million people pre-registered for tickets, breaking records once again. 1.5 million people were sent the initial codes and the remaining 2 million were stuck in limbo waiting to get a chance. The site just reached its capacity in every way, with 3.5 million people on Ticketmaster and bots trying to score tickets to sell on other markets,
Of course, with the attention this conundrum has caused, tickets are now being sold on ticket resale sites for well over face value. There are some tickets currently on the market for the price of a car, or a down payment on a house. Clearly, this is going to be the hottest concert of the century, but I am not ready to spend a chunk of my salary to get there.
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