Taylor Swift’s public sale has been cancelled by Ticketmaster. After surviving the Eras Tour presale, I get why fans are upset

Ticketmaster has cancelled the public release of tickets to Taylor Swift’s upcoming tour.

This week was supposed to go as follows: on Tuesday, fans with presale codes would be able to buy tickets. Capital One credit card holders would get to shop on Wednesday. And the general public would be able to buy whatever was left on Friday.

Sorry, general public. No tickets for you.

Thursday afternoon, Ticketmaster tweeted the public release had been cancelled “due to extraordinarily high demands on ticketing systems and insufficient remaining ticket inventory.” That tweet was quote retweeted with user comments over 45,000 times within a few hours of being posted.

The Star has reached out to Ticketmaster for comment.

Earlier this week, some Swift-aligned deity took pity on me and I was able to secure my ticket, but how my journey went is still an example of how broken concert ticket buying has become under major industry player Ticketmaster.

It’s no secret that I’m a Swift mega-fan — a “Swiftie” — and when the artist recently announced she’d be touring the United States in 2023, I went feral. Having never seen Swift in concert, I whispered an apology to my savings account. I studied the Star’s time-off policy to ensure I’d have time for a quick jaunt to Nashville in the new year. I researched American stadiums and their seating charts in great detail.

Fatefully, I received a coveted presale code. I even received what Ticketmaster called a “boost” in the presale queue — a small reward for having bought merchandise over the years.

When the Eras Tour presale rolled around on Tuesday morning, I was prepared.

Swift picked an unfortunate time to release a song called “Glitch.” Because glitch Ticketmaster did. Once I joined the queue for the May 6 Nashville show, the site immediately crashed. The queue paused for approximately four hours before starting to limp along at the end of the work day. I checked the queue frequently, but no, it really was stuck like that for hours, and a flurry of tweets and TikToks confirmed that thousands (millions?) of folks hoping to score tickets were experiencing the same problem.

The queue eventually restarted. I made it to the front. The perfect tickets, within my budget were in sight.

And then Ticketmaster crashed again.

Reader, I did not score Taylor Swift tickets through Ticketmaster. In truth, much like for Toronto’s Harry Styles tour stop, I don’t know anyone who did.

My ticket came from StubHub late Tuesday night, after 90 minutes of frantically refreshing the page until a scalped ticket appeared in my price range. I’m not proud of having resorted to StubHub, which now boasts numerous tickets for over $10,000.

But hey, at least I’ll see Taylor Swift. It’s bittersweet, and expensive, and intensely frustrating. But I’m poised to have one unforgettable night next May, I guess.

This week, Swift and her upcoming tour have been at the centre of a now age-old question: is it time for Ticketmaster to go? Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted this week that Ticketmaster needs to be “reigned in.” Sen. Amy Klobuchar wrote an open letter to Ticketmaster and LiveNation expressing skepticism that their 2010 merger had resulted in the “easy-access, one-stop platform” consumers had been promised. Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti tweeted plans to ensure “no consumer laws were violated” during the botched rollout of the Eras Tour pre-sales.

Ticketmaster has been the subject of criticism for years — many believe it to be a monopoly (and even if it isn’t, it certainly owns a hefty share of the ticketing market). As well, the platform uses a divisive technology known as “dynamic pricing,” which essentially means that the more desirable tickets are, the more expensive they become. Fans this week reported that Swift employed dynamic pricing — ticket values noticeably rose between the presale and the Capital One sale — and many have expressed anger at the star and Ticketmaster for this perceived price-gouging.

It’s a problem for which there’s no immediate solution. Demand for the presale wildly exceeded expectations, apparently, and besides, the stadiums large enough to conceivably host Swift have exclusive agreements with Ticketmaster. Greedy exclusivity contracts like these create a lose-lose endeavour for fans, who this week have watched in dismay as more and more tickets have appeared at eye-watering rates on resale sites.

For the 2018 Reputation Stadium Tour, Swift employed a Verified Fan program which forced fans to play games, watch videos and buy merchandise to gain access to pre-sales. It worked — very few tickets got into the hands of scalpers. It defies understanding why the Swift camp and Ticketmaster didn’t create such a program this time around.

And to top off what’s been a sour week for 99 per cent of Swift fans, today Ticketmaster eliminated its public ticket sale.

Let that sink in: this tour sold so astronomically well in its first two days that there are simply not enough tickets left to be sold. And a hefty chunk of those sales were to scalpers. How were so many tickets even made available to render public sale moot?

While it seems Ticketmaster is the problem here, Swift has also been noticeably quiet this week, save for promoting a new remix of “Anti-Hero.”

Let’s hope Taylor Nation and her team learn from this experience in time for the rollout of the international leg of the Eras Tour. And who even knows if Toronto will get a tour date — none’s been announced yet. But if Swift decides to extend the Eras Tour into Canada, Ticketmaster needs to shape up. Or, yes, “shake it off.”

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