On Friday, Taylor Swift finally shared a statement about the absolute chaos her fans have been dealing with as they try to buy tickets to her upcoming Eras Tour. Faced with insanely long online waits, confusing emails, dynamic pricing setting them back tens of thousands of dollars, and reports of accidental overcharging, the Swifties were on the verge of rioting and asking themselves some painful questions: Is capitalism bad? And does Taylor Swift love capitalism?
The Midnights musician reassured her followers on her Instagram Stories to prevent total existential meltdown.
“It goes without saying that I’m extremely protective of my fans,” Swift wrote. “It’s really difficult for me to trust an outside entity with these relationships and loyalties, and excruciating for me to just watch mistakes happen with no recourse.”
She added there were “multitude of reasons why people had such a hard time” getting tickets, and, from Swift’s point of view, it’s basically all Tickemaster’s fault.
“I’m not going to make excuses for anyone because we asked them, multiple times, if they could handle this kind of demand and we were assured they could,” the singer wrote. “It’s 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 added that she would try to “figure out how this situation can be improved moving forward.”
“To those who didn’t get tickets, all I can say is that my hope is to provide more opportunities for us to get together and sing these songs,” Swift concluded. “Thank you for wanting to be there. You have no idea how much that means.”
Sales began Tuesday, but even verified fans with a pre-sale code were unable to get their seats. The verified fan system was started by Ticketmaster in 2017 as a way of weeding out bots and handling high demand, but more than 3.5 million people pre-registered, making it the largest registration in the company’s history. Sales to the general public that were set open Friday ended up being canceled due to “extraordinarily high demands on ticketing systems and insufficient remaining ticket inventory to meet that demand.”
This fiasco may end up cooking Ticketmaster’s goose. The company merged with Live Nation in 2010, one of its few competitors, establishing what many see as an illegal monopoly. Both Democrats and Republican politicians are calling for investigations after the online furor around this tour — accommodating Swifties is apparently a bi-partisan issue.
Source: W Magazine
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