Despite being a Capital One cardholder, which was supposed to give customers early access to presale tickets, Macy Trout was stuck in a queue between 45 minutes and an hour for Taylor Swift Eras Tour tickets.
“I got let in and it literally felt like a warzone, every time I would put tickets in my cart it would say another fan beat you to it and I was like, ‘no, this is so bad,’” said Trout, a senior environmental studies major. “But I am lucky I got two tickets and I feel like even if you had everything stacked up for you, it was literally just random.”
Swift fans in Philadelphia are hoping it won’t be a “Cruel Summer” after chaos ensued during the Eras Tour presale on Ticketmaster last week. Many fans were stuck in the Ticketmaster presale queue line for several hours, while others had issues even after believing they had secured tickets.
Swift will be coming to Lincoln Financial Field on May 12, 13 and 14 as part of her Eras Tour, which is focused on revisiting all the musical eras of her career. This is the first time Swift has toured since her Reputation Tour nearly five years ago.
Presales opened on the morning of Nov. 15 and an influx of fans on the site caused glitches, long wait times and many fans to not receive tickets, The New York Times reported. Ticketmaster then canceled the general sale scheduled for Nov. 18 due to high demand and a lack of sufficient ticket inventory.
Swift took to her Instagram on Friday and addressed the problems her fans faced with ordering tickets through Ticketmaster.
“I’m trying to figure out how this situation can be improved moving forward,” Swift wrote. “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.”
Darcy Concannon, a senior public relations major, did not get a code to participate in the presale, despite signing up for the presale a week before it opened. Concannon, a longtime Swift fan, is disappointed in the artist’s handling of ticket sales.
“People like to blame management and ticket vendors on a lot of things, but if I’m being honest, it seems more like Taylor Swift is an adult woman who can make decisions about how she runs her ticket sales and made the wrong decisions,” Concannon said.
Apeksha Sood, a junior health professions major, was disappointed by the general sale’s cancellation because she did not get tickets during the pre-sale.
“I really do enjoy her music,” Sood said. “And I was excited about this specific tour because it’s like the Era so she was doing a lot of her older music too, which is what I grew up listening, so I was like, ‘oh my god, this will be such a good concert.’”
During the pre-sale, many scalpers purchased tickets so they could make a profit in the resale market, The Washington Post reported. This led some Swift fans, like Sood, to give up on going to the concert entirely.
“I’m not gonna go because I looked at the tickets and the starting price for the shows are like 700, $800 for the seats like literally in the very, very back and I was like, people are insane,” Sood said.
Scalpers are notorious for using online bots to obtain tickets to resell on secondary market sites. This is the case with the Eras Tour, where many people are speculating whether Swift fans or scalpers were able to get the majority of tickets, The Washington Post reported.
Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro is asking Pennsylvanians to file complaints against Ticketmaster if they have experienced issues and the United States Department of Justice is investigating Live Nation, an entertainment company that owns Ticketmaster, about whether the company is abusing its power in the music industry.
Ticketmaster currently holds a 70 percent market share in the industry, and has made little to no efforts to optimize its site to handle high traffic or address the use of bots, Forbes reported.
“I think people should be able to resell their tickets to get their money back if they can’t go like I don’t think that should be a problem,” Trout said. “But I think selling a ticket for $20,000 is a little excessive.”
Annie Doyle, a senior political science major, struggled to secure her and her sister’s tickets after being charged for them.
“So it shows up in our account that we have tickets to the show,” Doyle said. “We got no confirmation email and no virtual tickets. So it was just sort of like now what. Like, do we have them or not?”
Eventually, Doyle received confirmation that she received her tickets at around 10 p.m. the night of the presale on the 15th, but she called the process “an absolute mess.”
Despite the confusion, Doyle is excited to see the 32-year-old Pennsylvania native in concert.
“I love her,” Doyle said. “This is my second Taylor Swift concert that I’m going to. It’s my oldest sister’s first time going so we’re all very excited.”
Duay Augustine contributed reporting.
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