Taylor Swift recently announced her long awaited tour, Eras. Fans were ecstatic considering her last tour, Reputation, was over four years ago. This tour is going to cover songs from each of her albums from over the years, including her new album, Midnights. On Instagram, Swift describes it as “a journey through the musical eras of my career (past and present)”. The tour would hit major cities all over the United States. With over 26 shows, fans were expecting tickets to be hard to come by, but not impossible.

Ticketmaster, an American ticket sale and distribution company, was in charge of ticket sales for the tour. Ticketmaster said that the demand for the tour was twice the amount of the top five tours of 2022 and the Super Bowl COMBINED. Along with the tickets, they also had to pre-approve fans for the presale tickets. Ticketmaster also stated that 3.5 million people requested presale codes. That is the most requests in the company’s history. Only 1.5 million people received the presale code and another 2 million were put on the waitlist. When the presale was released for all tour dates on Tuesday, November 15th, it is said that 14 million people showed up on the website. This caused many glitches and crashes on the site. Ticketmaster also states that if they were to meet the demand, Taylor Swift would have to have 900 stadium tours, which is one show every night for 2.5 years. In total, 2 million tickets were sold that day which is the most any artist has sold in one singular day. Because so many tickets were sold, the general public tickets were canceled.

Many fans heavily relied on the general public tickets since presale was so hard to come by. Friday, November 18th, was the day the general audience tickets were going to go on sale. The day before, Ticketmaster sent out a tweet stating “Due to extraordinarily high demand on ticketing systems and insufficient remaining ticket inventory to meet that demand, tomorrow’s (Friday’s) public on sale for Taylor Swift | Eras Tour has been canceled.” Fans were outraged at the disorganization. In response, Taylor Swift posted on Instagram saying, “ I’m not going to make any excuses for anyone because we asked them, multiple times, if they could handle this kind of demand and we are assured they could.” She also adds, “ And to those who didn’t get tickets, all I can say is that my hope is to provide more opportunities for us to all get together and sing these songs.” Now, Tickets are being resold for double and even triple the price. Some nosebleeds are being resold for almost two thousand dollars.

Fans are enraged by the fact that general audience tickets were canceled. Personally, my family and I attempted to purchase tickets through the Capital One presale. After waiting almost two hours in the queue, we finally were able to get a hold of tickets. We had the tickets in the cart, ready to purchase. Yet, Ticketmaster refreshed our page, making us lose our tickets. My family and I were so frustrated. We spent hours trying to get the tickets, when we finally did, Ticketmaster caused us to lose them. In the end, we wanted our time and were left upset.

Ticketmaster is now facing a lot of backlash. Hopefully, the corporation will fix their mistakes. Many fans were left heartbroken due to the poor planning and management of the website.