After breaking multiple records with her newest album, “Midnights,” Taylor Swift made headlines once again with the recent ticket sale on Ticketmaster for her upcoming tour, “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour.”  

With the overwhelming amount of attention and excitement surrounding the upcoming tour, demand for tickets was very high. In order to combat this and make sure everyone had a chance to purchase tickets, Swift teamed up with Ticketmaster’s Verified Fan and Capital One to provide fans with the opportunity to participate in ticket presales. The first presale allowed fans to register for Verified Fan, a preregistration process that verified buyers’ identities before the presale began to ensure bots did not buy all of the tickets, and those that were picked had access to the sale from 10 a.m. on Nov. 15 to 10 p.m. on Nov. 17. The second presale was for Capital One cardholders and was set to last from 2 p.m. on Nov. 15 to 10 p.m. on Nov. 17.  Then, after both presales ended, the general public sale was set to be on Nov.18. 

“By requiring registrations, Verified Fan is designed to help manage high demand shows – identifying real humans and weeding out bots. Keeping bots out of queues and avoiding overcrowding helps to make wait times shorter and onsales smoother,” Verified Fan said in a statement on their website.  

However, their plan did not go as they had hoped; for the Verified Fan presale, there were site crashes, and people were being kicked out before they could purchase their tickets. In order to fix the problems, the Capital One presale was rescheduled to Nov.16 at 2 p.m., but tickets sold out in less than an hour. Even though the presales were created to combat bots and scalpers, many fans were not able to purchase tickets because scalpers were buying them just to sell them on ticket resale sites for inflated prices, with some selling for as much as $21,000 each. To make matters worse, fans who were not able to participate in the presales did not have a chance to buy tickets for the concert at all, as the general public sale was canceled. 

“The Ticketmaster experience was absolutely awful. They clearly were not prepared for the traffic, and it took me seven hours to even get to pick my tickets,” Laika Olwana, sophomore, said. 

This situation has caused many fans to express their outrage with Ticketmaster and how they conducted the ticket sale. It also brought in national attention, with many government leaders and politicians speaking out about Ticketmaster and its growing monopoly. The Justice Department has even opened an antitrust investigation into Ticketmaster and its parent company, Live Nation Entertainment.  

“It is truly amazing that 2.4 million people got tickets, but it really pisses me off that a lot of them feel like they went through several bear attacks to get them,” Swift said in a statement.  

Congratulations to those who were able to purchase tickets, but for those who were not as fortunate, good luck next time.