Following the release of Taylor Swift’s tenth studio album, “Midnights,” on Nov. 1, Swift announced her sixth tour — “The Eras Tour.” After her “Reputation Stadium Tour” in 2018, her “Loverfest” tour in 2020 was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. “The Eras Tour” will be her first tour in five years, opening with artists including Gracie Abrams, Paramore, and Phoebe Bridgers. 

The tour will feature songs from each of Swift’s ten “eras,” or albums. The demand for tickets to “The Eras Tour” was unequivocally high in part because of the long gap between tours and a large number of new fans, or “Swifties,” who haven’t been to any of Swift’s concerts. 

The Great War: Unprecedented Demand

When Swift made the announcement for the tour on Good Morning America and her social media, fans immediately headed to Ticketmaster to sign up for the Verified Fan presale, the sale held before the general sale to “help as many fans as possible attend the events they love at the price set by the artists,” according to Ticketmaster.

However, what fans encountered was not a simple sign-up page like what they would encounter for other artists’ tours. Instead, they sat through a queue for hours on end due to heavy traffic on the Ticketmaster website, where 3.5 million people had signed up for the presale — the largest in registration history. Only 1.5 million were sent codes. The remaining 2 million were placed on a waiting list and would be given access to the presale later in the small chance a code went unused. 

On Nov. 15 — the day of the presale — fans waited in a waiting room, unbeknownst to how long it would take to get to the ticket-buying page of Ticketmaster. “I got a presale code, logged in to Ticketmaster, put in my presale code to get in, and I got into the queue and waited six hours before I got in to actually purchase the tickets,” sophomore Lexi Anspach said. When they finally got access to the tickets, many were unable to purchase any because bots and people who didn’t have presale codes joined the queue, causing Ticketmaster to crash multiple times. “It crashed four times for me, and I had to restart the process of waiting in the whole line, which had 2,000+ people ahead of me,” Anspach said. 

On Nov. 17, two days after the Verified Fan presale and one day after the Capital One presale, Ticketmaster tweeted: “Due to extraordinarily high demands on ticketing systems and insufficient remaining ticket inventory to meet that demand, tomorrow’s public on-sale for Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour has been canceled.” This led to an outrage from fans who were unable to buy tickets previously and whose only remaining hope was the general sale which had now been canceled with no rescheduled date. A day later, they issued an explanation for the cancellation on their website, blaming the traffic on their website on “bot attacks as well as fans who didn’t have codes, resulting in 3.5 billion total system requests.” Despite these disruptions, however, 2 million tickets were sold — the most tickets ever sold for an artist in a single day.

Look What You Made Me Do: Fans Take Action

On Nov. 18, Swift posted an Instagram story explaining her side of the story. This was the first time her tour caused such uproar — this was also the first time Swift and her team didn’t help out her fans receive tickets. In 2018, fans could stream her music and buy merchandise in order to get exclusive access to tickets for the Reputation Stadium Tour before everybody else. This time around, there was no such thing. “I’m not going to make excuses for anyone because we asked [Ticketmaster], multiple times, if they could handle this kind of demand, and we were assured that they could,” Swift said.

The backlash surrounding the whole situation came in several ways, first in the form of outrage on social media, and second when Swifties turned to the legal system. In early December, over two dozen class action lawsuits were filed against Ticketmaster LLC, and its parent company Live Nation Entertainment Inc., in the U.S. Federal Court in California. 

A class action lawsuit is when a group of people — the plaintiff — have suffered in the same way because of how the person they are suing — the defendant — has conducted their business. The allegations against Ticketmaster claimed that they were  “engaging in fraud, price-fixing, antitrust violations, anticompetitive behavior, and intentional misrepresentation.” This lawsuit said that Ticketmaster had advertised these tickets through their TaylorSwiftTix Verified Fan Presale, which was supposed to ensure that bots would not be able to get tickets and resell them at a higher cost — which happens to benefit Ticketmaster.

Fans assert that Ticketmaster also violates antitrust laws by doing this, making this an even deeper issue. Antitrust laws refer to the set of federal laws that control how businesses operate in order to prevent monopolies, or when one group has control over all or most of a particular trade. In this case, that trade would be the sale of tickets in large stadiums or venues. Because bigger artists are forced to go through Ticketmaster in order to accommodate their fanbase, sometimes the intention to keep the prices at a set level doesn’t become a reality. If Ticketmaster is found guilty of violating these laws, they could pay $2,500 per civil violation — which under California law, refers to any “unlawful, unfair or fraudulent business act or practice and unfair, deceptive, untrue or misleading advertising.” In total, Ticketmaster could pay millions of dollars to the plaintiffs due to the enormous amounts of fans who weren’t able to get tickets and the legal fees of the plaintiffs, which they would have to cover. 

On Jan. 24, the Senate Judiciary Committee heard the Ticketmaster case — specifically the charges of antitrust violations — because they are created by the government. 

This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: What Could’ve Been Done?

In 2017, shortly after Swift released her “reputation” album and announced the “Reputation Stadium Tour,” she partnered with Ticketmaster and created the TaylorSwiftTix portal, where registered users had access to tickets before the general public did. This was similar to the process fans had to go through for the “Eras Tour.” 

However, back then, fans had the opportunity to participate in “boost activities,” which increased their chances of the ability to purchase face-value tickets. They could purchase physical copies of the album, which would come with a boost code; they could follow Swift on her verified accounts on all social media platforms; they could buy merchandise, watch music videos, and promote the album on Facebook and Twitter. All these gave fans an upper hand and separated them from bots and other people who proved to not be as dedicated. It is unknown as to why Ticketmaster didn’t do something similar for this tour, since doing so would’ve boosted engagement on their site as well as been profitable for Swift.

Fans just want to see their favorite artists live. Many fans are of the opinion that it shouldn’t be this complicated and expensive to buy a ticket for two and a half hours of live music. In her Instagram story, Swift said, “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.”