On Nov. 15, 2022, 1.5 million fans received verified fan codes in an attempt to get tickets for the concerts in Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour. Ticketmaster then began to glitch, the site crashed, and there were extremely long wait times. The following day the Capital One sale started. This sale was exclusively for fans who had the Capital One credit card. After two days of chaotic sales, Ticketmaster canceled the general public sale scheduled for Nov. 17. 

Those who did get tickets had to pay thousands of dollars and went through multiple site crashes and glitches. Numerous fans wishing to get tickets were unable to with the cancellation of the general sale.

Taylor Swift reached out to fans through an Instagram story on Nov. 18 saying that she cares about her fans greatly and so does her team. She also said, “It’s really difficult for me to trust an outside entity with these relationships and loyalties, and excruciating for me to just watch mistakes happen with no recourse.” She then goes on to say, “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.”

Later that day, Ticketmaster responded by apologizing for these inconveniences and saying that the reason for the issues was the high demand and computer bots that were buying up tickets. 

Ticketmaster is a website owned by Live Nation where you can buy tickets for concerts, Broadway musicals, sporting events, and more.

The Swiftie fandom hasn’t been the first fanbase to deal with problems as major celebrities as well as smaller artists have dealt with similar issues.  

Back in 1992, Pearl Jam, like Taylor Swift, had trusted Ticketmaster to handle a free Labor Day concert in Seattle, but Ticketmaster had a different idea and wanted to add a service fee to each ticket.

In 1994, the band went on tour where they played only at venues where tickets were at most worth $18 and fees at $1.80 in response to their previous experiences with Ticketmaster.

The company’s fees ranged from $4 and $8 dollars in 1994. Unable to meet Pearl Jam’s desire for cheap fees, the band decided to try and tour outside of Ticketmaster. Ticketsmaster then tried to arrange a boycott of that tour. 

Again in 2009, Bruce Springsteen fans were paying hundreds of dollars above the face value because Ticketmaster had brought people to a reseller on their website. 

There have been many other artists with similar problems when dealing with Ticketmaster.

Up-and-coming country artist Zach Bryan has also made it well known by tweets that he dislikes Ticketmaster as well due to their high prices. Because of this, he released “All My Homies Hate Ticketmaster (Live from Red Rocks)” on Christmas of last year. For Bryan’s upcoming tour, he used AXS, instead of Ticketmaster and made sure all tickets would be affordable for all. 

With multiple events of Ticketmaster being untrustworthy and leading to tickets being worth more than intended, it would be advised to find tickets for your upcoming events and concerts at other websites. 

As concert season starts up again for the summer, there are other websites to try when getting tickets. Next time, there’s Vivid Seats, SeatGeek, StubHub, and more. Thankfully, there is a way to enjoy your next concert without spending an arm and a leg.