Swifties Overpower Ticketmaster

The big stage, the flashing lights, colorful lights, loud music, and your favorite artist is about to come out to put on one of the best shows. Taylor Swift is known for her out of the world concerts. The fans went crazy as Taylor Swift finally announced a new upcoming tour, The Eras Tour, on Good Morning America on November 1st. Fans have suspected this announcement, but once it was official it felt like the world was going to explode. Which is exactly what happened to Ticketmaster when they presented Taylor’s Verified Fan Presale.

You may ask, how does Ticketmaster’s Verified Fan Presale work? Some artists choose to do verified fan to give their fans a better chance to get tickets and to ensure they are real. In the case that they do, fans have the opportunity to sign up to receive a code. Unfortunately, these codes aren’t guaranteed; they are selected or waitlisted. For people who get waitlisted, they don’t have a chance at presale and have to try to get tickets during the general sale. For people who got selected, they will receive a code which they will use to get into the presale. In this case, Taylor did a Verified Fan Presale on Monday at 10a.m., a Capital One Presale on Monday at 2p.m., which was specifically for Capital One card holders, and a general sale on Friday at 10a.m.

So what went wrong during the Eras Tour presale?

There is one thing everyone, including Ticketmaster knew for sure: Ticketmaster knew what the demand for her tours will be. They repeatedly announced that there is a historic high demand but they never fully prepared for what they were saying. On November 15 at 10 a.m. started the Verified Presale, as fans tried to get into the waiting room the website would crash. Once people got kicked out, it would be impossible to get back in and fans constantly saw the error 503 message.

As if one problem wasn’t enough more problems kept appearing, getting kicked out of the queue line and getting put in the back, codes not working, the lines were paused for every show, and there was nothing anyone could do. Fans were getting angry and twitter was erupting. No one knew what was going on as Ticketmaster nor Taylor’s team weren’t updating anyone. There was a speculation where Ticketmaster sent codes to fans which weren’t generated. After hours and hours of waiting, many fans didn’t get tickets and were devastated.

Some fans still had hope for a chance at tickets as Capital One holders had a separate opportunity. Since the presales were on the same day and the one for verified fans went horribly they had to postpone the Capital One presale to the following day. As it hit 1:30p.m. the website already started crashing as people tried to getting into the waiting room, parallel to what happened the day before.

People expected Ticketmaster to fix the problems from the previous day but it was clear they didn’t. This frustrated the fans because at this point there was nothing they could do. Once it hit 2p.m., everyone was hoping for a low number in the queue line to hopefully pass through this terrible experience. The lines stopped moving again but this time there was no specific reason, it was just because Ticketmaster did not know how to control millions of people on their website and apps at once. That being said, Ticketmaster ultimately canceled the general sale which was heartbreaking to people who wanted one last shot and for people who didn’t have any presale and this was their only shot.

After silence, Taylor Swift and her team posted a statement regarding Ticketmaster. Although this didn’t fix much, fans were grateful for them to say something which was something Ticketmaster lacked. Taylor once said “it’s me, hi, I’m the problem it’s me,” but really Ticketmaster is the problem. What are these ridiculous fees they are charging fans going towards? It doesn’t seem like it’s going towards their website or engineers to prevent all these errors. There is one thing all Swifties can agree on, hating Ticketmaster!