Ticketmaster and Taylor Swift

By: Abisola Dosunmu

Image taken from: https://www.instyle.com/taylor-swift-bejeweled-skirt-bodysuit-2022-mtv-emas-6828460

On Tuesday, November 15, the Eras Tour tickets went on sale through Ticketmaster and the demand has skyrocketed since the first day. Over 2 million tickets were sold, and over 3.5 million people registered as Verified Fans. Because of that, the Ticketmaster website was flooded with traffic, and users experienced constant crashes, technical difficulties, and having to wait hours on the site, just for a chance to get a ticket. There were also a lot of bot attacks and fans who didn’t have invite codes on the website.

“I attempted to get presale by signing up for ‘verified fan,’ but I got waitlisted, and they cancelled general sale, so I was unable to get tickets. However, there are also many people who did get the presale code, but still didn’t get tickets, which I think is really unfortunate. I think it’s weird that so many codes were sent out that tickets were sold out before some people with presale could get tickets, because that shouldn’t have been possible. Obviously Ticketmaster is at fault and not Taylor and her team, though,” Erin Moore, “Swiftie”, stated.

Eventually, Ticketmaster had to cancel their public sale of tickets, due to the complaints and other external difficulties. They issued an apology that Friday night, apologizing to Taylor Swift and the fans that had a less than enjoyable experience buying tickets on their site. They offered more information on what happened.

So what caused it?

Well, I went to the link they added in their tweet explaining what happened—and the gist is Taylor Swift is so awesome she caused her own problem. The demand for her tickets was so high she broke records. And in turn, their website. Never before had a verified fan ticket sale attracted so much attention and traffic. Over 2 million tickets were sold on Ticketmaster for Taylor Swift—in a single day. That’s the most tickets sold for an artist ever.

Also, Ticketmaster made users log in to get the tickets and enter a code to complete the purchase of tickets, just to limit the amount of bots that were on their site. Because of that, huge amounts of traffic from verified fans, unverified fans, and bots, hit the site, which meant Ticketmaster had to slow down queues to keep them from crashing. As a result, many fans ended up not getting their tickets.

As annoying as it is to have to wait long periods of time to end up not getting what you’re waiting for anyways, it’s impossible for everyone to have gotten their tickets to the show. The people (and bots) on Ticketmaster hoping to get tickets would have led Taylor to perform over two hundred stadium shows—She’d be performing every single night for the next 2.5 years. That’s impossible. So, playing the devil’s advocate here, from what I’ve learned, even though Ticketmaster could have done something to make the process of buying tickets easier, something like this was bound to happen anyway, given how popular Taylor Swift is.

Taylor responded to this in her Instagram story, and it’s pretty long, so I’ll just include a picture of it here.

So what happens now?

As of Sunday, December 4th, some Swiftie lawyers (called Vigilante Legal—a reference to one of Taylor’s songs, named “vigilante sh*t”) have banded together to file suit against Ticketmaster. Ticketmaster is also promised further scrutiny from the government. I am unsure what further consequences will befall Ticketmaster and what effects will come from all of this, but there are a lot of people now paying attention to the ticket selling giant, and I doubt Ticketmaster will be allowed to mess up like this again.

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