Ever since Taylor Swift announced The Eras tour, Swifties have been awaiting the sale of tickets. In order to supply a surplus of tickets, Swift prepared to use the website Ticketmaster. Ticketmaster assured Taylor that they would be able to handle the amount of tickets that were going to be purchased due to all of the tour dates that had been set. However, many fans were unhappy, even furious, with the services they received trying to use Ticketmaster. 

Many experienced Ticketmaster crashing, or even freezing, which made them unable to purchase as much as one ticket. The malfunction allowed people to purchase multiple tickets at once, and those people would then resell them later, for as high as $60,000. After asking our peers about their experiences, we found that many of them felt the same about the problematic situation.

When asked about her experience, Mariana Anderson, a junior here at Adams, said, “My experience was just really annoying. I was exhausted because I was thinking about it all day. [Addie and I] prepared so well and still, even after hours of waiting, we weren’t able to get tickets. I’m mad, and Ticketmaster should be canceled.”

Another junior at Adams, Nathan Bermudez, said, “Ticketmaster let me on just seven minutes after third hour had started. I was behind 894 people. I had to navigate the hallways trying not to lose my connection and lose my spot in line since I was on my school chromebook. After getting to my fourth hour class, the line said it was paused. A while later the line started to move again and I was behind 769 other people. To make matters worse there was a fire drill during seventh hour and I was forced to take it outside and try to continue to try and get tickets. Moving outside made it disconnect but then I got in. As soon as I tried to get tickets it said error and I was scared to try and refresh again and lose all of my progress.” 

Not only are the young fans upset about the ticketmaster mishap, but adults are as well. One man said, “I entered both pre-sales on Ticketmaster. I was not selected from the random draw for the first one, so I bought a Capital One card specifically for the second one. I spent about six hours total and about four of them were just in the actual queue. My place never moved from the screen saying ‘2000+ ahead of you’. Eventually a little bubble popped up on the bottom of the screen saying that all of the tickets had been sold. I still had hope for the general public sale a few days later however. The day before the public sale was when Ticketmaster announced that they had sold every ticket available for the tour. All of the waiting and begging I did to get a ticket from them went to waste after they messed up so badly that they ran out of the tickets that they should definitely not have run out of. It was a huge disappointment. Recently, a few Swifties started a lawsuit because of this whole debacle, and I hope I can help in making Ticketmaster lose.” 

Another woman said, “I tried to purchase tickets from 10:30 a.m. until 6:00 p.m. at night, and every time I would get in the queue to purchase tickets, it would tell me I was on the wrong device and it happened over and over again. I had the same problems as everyone else: being 2000+ in line and having to wait for so long, with many delays. I was frustrated and sad that I couldn’t purchase tickets in order to continue my tradition of seeing Taylor in concert like I always have.”

On the other hand, a freshman named Willa Kricheff, had an unlikely positive experience, although it was not first hand: “My friend’s dad managed to get four tickets in a row! I don’t know how, but I do know that he was stressed in the process.”

Overall, the Ticketmaster x Taylor Swift situation will go down in history. Not only did the presale go horribly, but Ticketmaster somehow allowed all of the tickets to be sold during presale, so no regular sale was held. This meant that a large amount of fans (the ones who didn’t enter into presale or were not let into presale) weren’t even able to attempt to buy tickets, let alone succeed at buying them. It was disastrous; so much so that Taylor Swift herself posted an apology on behalf of Ticketmaster and her act of choosing to use it to sell her tickets. Fans are so infuriated that many are filing lawsuits against Ticketmaster. All of this to say, Ticketmaster has suffered quite a lot of hate, and for good reason. This was unfair and we Swifties want another chance to buy tickets.