What Happened With Taylor Swift And Ticketmaster?

If you use social media in one form or another, there’s a high chance you’ve seen hordes of Taylor Swift fans scrambling to get tickets to the 2023 US leg of her upcoming The Eras Tour. What you might not know, is that the Swiftie chaos was just for the presale alone. Today, Ticketmaster canceled the general on-sale — that is commonplace for most, if not all musicians (except for BTS’ Permission To Dance shows, which also had general cancelled). And this has only added fuel to the online fire.

Originally, Swifties were able to sign up for Ticketmaster’s Verified Fan program until November 9, which allowed them to rank their preferred show dates. If chosen for the presale, fans were sent an exclusive code that would’ve allowed them to purchase up to six tickets. However, as fans on the East Coast found out Tuesday morning, this was not the case.

Between long queue lines, fans with merch boosts not getting in, repeated false charges, technical issues with the site, and much more, by the time fans made it into the ticket purchase area, there were none left. This prompted the West Coast presale to get postponed. Capital One offered another presale for cardholders yesterday, which saw similar results.

In the wake of disastrous ticket sales for large-scale acts like Swift, Blink-182, Olivia Rodrigo, and more, even politicians are calling Ticketmaster’s policies into question. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Tennessee’s Attorney General, Jonathan Skrmetti, have pointed out the potential of Ticketmaster breaking consumer laws and antitrust violations for their Live Nation merger.

“The site was supposed to be opened up for 1.5 million verified Taylor Swift fans,” Greg Maffei, Live Nation’s CEO, said on a CNBC appearance today. “We had 14 million people hit the site, including bots — another story — which are not supposed to be there. And despite all the challenges and breakdowns, we did we sell over two million tickets that day. We could’ve filled 900 stadiums.”

And, while they might’ve sold two million tickets, the majority of those haven’t appeared to land in the hands of fans. Most are currently on sites like Stubhub and other ticket resale companies, going for as high as $27,000 for certain seats. One fan even pointed out that people are selling non-tickets, merely for listening access outside of Swift’s Massachusetts show.

Continue scrolling for some more Taylor Swift fan reactions to Ticketmaster’s problems.