Taylor Swift Tour Sales Crash After Unprecedented Demand
Only weeks after the debut of her newest album, “Midnights”, Taylor Swift announced that she will be performing her last four albums for the first time together on the “Eras Tour”, along with other six albums from earlier in her career. However, only hours after the presale for tickets launched on Ticketmaster, the server crashed from millions of users logging on at once, sparking mass outrage among the public.
At first, tickets were set to go live on Nov. 18, but as a result of Swift’s partnership with Capital One, company cardholders had access to a pre-sale that went live on Nov. 15. According to Ticketmaster, the presale program provided the best opportunity to get tickets into the hands of fans by evading bots and other barriers. This did not, however, go to plan;as soon as the presale went live, the website became overwhelmed with the volume of sales, causing it to shut down for the following hour. The servers were unable to answer and logged off the more than 2000 users who were in queue.
“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,” Swift said on her Instagram story. “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.”
As a result of the website continuously removing users from the queue and crashing, fans and the general public alike became outraged by the fact that Ticketmaster only prepared for a little over 1.5 million users, while 15 million logged on. The company tried to fix this problem by slowing down the sale and waitlisting more and more customers in an attempt to stabilize the systems, which only exacerbated the issue.
“I felt like they were very unprepared, especially since they knew the amount of presale codes they had given out. It was meant to be for fans only, but it ended up being just everyone.” — Maria Vandermeulen
I felt like they were very unprepared, especially since they knew the amount of presale codes they had given out,” junior Maria Vandermeulen said. “It was meant to be for fans only, but it ended up being just everyone.
Multiple news networks, politicians, and celebrities have criticized Ticketmaster, calling it an unfair monopoly as it controls almost 70% of all concert ticket sales. Multiple notable politicians have also stated that its merger with ticket-selling giant Live Nation has made this problem even worse, citing strong anti-trust laws to combat this move. Investigations were even opened up by both the Attorney Generals of Tennessee and North Carolina into consumer rights violations, with the U.S. Department of Justice joining in as well. A couple days after the incident, President Biden stated that even capitalism can cross the line into exploitation.
“If it’s a consumer protection violation and we can find exactly where the problems are, we can get a court order that makes the company do better,” Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti said in an announcement to the press. “That makes sure the problems that happened yesterday don’t happen again. If it’s not a consumer protection violation, but it’s an antitrust law that is violated, there is a wide range of options that are available.”
It is unclear exactly how this ticket fiasco will play out. Though the process to obtain a ticket may be difficult, one thing is for sure: the demand to see Swift perform is still there.
“I got tickets and I’m so excited.” Vandermeulen said. “It was worth the wait.”
