On November 1st, Taylor Swift made her fans’ wildest dreams come true with her announcement of the U.S. dates of her upcoming 2023 tour, Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour. This was the icing on the cake following Swift’s recent Midnights album release. It has been four years since Swift’s last tour, The Reputation Stadium Tour, which spread across North America, Asia, Europe, and Australia, for a total of 53 shows worldwide. For this upcoming tour, which will be her biggest yet, she will be performing 52 shows just within North America. Three of these 52 shows are taking place at MetLife Stadium, featuring a new special guest each night. These guests include Gayle, Phoebe Bridgers, Beabadoobee, and Gracie Abrams.

The tickets first went on sale on November 15th to those who received presale codes from Ticketmaster. The demand for tickets was so high many people were left on the waitlist; but when it came down to queuing up to get tickets, it took some people hours just to get in to buy tickets, with the screen often displaying that there were over 2,000 people ahead of them. There was a six ticket maximum to each account and prices ranged from $49 to $900, including vip packages.

Ticketmaster was unable to endure such high volumes of fans overloading the site on presale day. Only about 1.5 million people received the necessary presale codes while the remainder of previously registered fans were waitlisted, and yet 14 million people flooded the website trying to get tickets. This overload of people left fans waiting for hours; some were able to purchase tickets, while some were not. 

Sophomore Denise Chan, who was able to purchase tickets, said, “I’m really excited about the Eras Tour. It was literally a bloodbath getting tickets and even waiting for the presale selection email made me so nervous.  I know many people had trouble getting tickets and it took me nearly 3 hours to secure tickets in the nosebleeds.”  

As if attempting to purchase tickets with presale access was not difficult enough, Swifties have been frustrated and disappointed over Ticketmaster’s abrupt cancellation of the public sale of tickets. This public sale,scheduled to start on November 18th, was canceled due to high demands on the ticketing systems. 

Sophomore Madison Donenfeld stated, “Honestly, I am really excited for the tour. I didn’t get tickets during the presale though. I am a huge fan of Taylor Swift and she hasn’t toured since 2018. I thought this was a great opportunity to see her.” 

Ticketmaster had previously claimed that they could handle such a high volume of requests and fans on their sites. However, based on the reactions posted on social media and the chaos of purchasing tickets, the process did not go as smoothly as anticipated. 

Madison also said “When buying tickets the site continuously crashed, froze, and [had] other technical issues. It was impossible to get tickets.”

An investigation into Ticketmaster has already been announced. Led by the Tennessee Attorney General,  it will be deliberated whether the problem was a consumer protection violation or an antitrust law violation. Ticketmaster has reportedly been tweaking the previously announced prices with the addition of processing fees.

As to the general sale that has been canceled, there are still millions of tickets to be sold for her tour worldwide. The lack of information regarding what will happen to these tickets and what is going on with Ticketmaster leaves millions of fans questioning if they will even be able to see Swift in concert.

Photo by Amy Jiang