Taylor Swift Fans Are Now Suing Ticketmaster Over the Eras Tour Sales Debacle
Taylor Swift Fans Are Now Suing Ticketmaster Over the Eras Tour Sales Debacle
Everyone knew getting tickets for Taylor Swift's The Eras Tour was going to be a challenge. But no one — especially not Ticketmaster, the platform responsible for distributing said tickets — seemed remotely aware of just how messy the process would turn out to be.
Swift first announced The Eras Tour on Nov. 1, and added eight more dates on Nov. 4. The fact that some brides considered changing their wedding dates to attend the tour foreshadowed the chaos that would come when tickets finally went on sale.
Ticketmaster's Verified Fan program allows people to register in advance and gain access to presale tickets. According to The Verge, more than 3.5 million people registered for the program in preparation for Swift's tour — the largest registration in the site's history — and about 1.5 million were given access to the presale. However, according to Ticketmaster, bots and fans without invite codes flooded the site when the presale opened on Nov. 15, causing the site to crash repeatedly — and evoking extreme ire among Swifties. Fans complained of hours-long wait times that resulted in technical glitches, as well as presale phases that were rescheduled or canceled.
On Nov. 17, Ticketmaster announced that the general sale wouldn't open at all. "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 cancelled," the company tweeted.
There's no word so far about if or when tickets will open to the public, but tickets are already on sale all over resale sites — and they're selling for $400 to over $22,000, per The Guardian. Even some of the lucky few who did get to purchase tickets may have paid more than they expected because of a dynamic pricing model.
On Nov. 18, Swift took to Instagram Stories to address the controversy, writing a long statement that read, in part, "There are a multitude of reasons why people had such a hard time trying to get tickets and I'm trying to figure out how this situation can be improved moving forward." (Reps for Swift and Ticketmaster did not immediately respond to POPSUGAR's request for comment.) As of Dec. 3, fans have taken matters into their own hands and are preparing to sue Ticketmaster's parent company, Live Nation Entertainment, according to court documents obtained by Deadline.
