Taylor Swift just announced her first tour in over four years, called The Eras Tour, and Ticketmaster essentially crashed from fans rushing to get presale tickets. This has led to outrage among fans who were unable to get tickets and widespread scrutiny over Ticketmaster’s sales practices.
What is the Taylor Swift Eras Tour?
The Eras Tour will be Taylor Swift’s first tour since her Reputation Stadium Tour in 2018. The tour is set to kick off in March 2023 in Glendale, Arizona and will hit 52 stadiums across the United States over the course of 5 months before concluding in Los Angeles in August 2023.
The tour is named “The Eras Tour” as it will focus on Taylor’s different musical eras throughout her prolific career spanning 17 years. Taylor Swift has released 10 studio albums to date, each with a distinct style and theme, so fans are excited to potentially hear songs from all aspects of her discography performed live.
Why are Taylor Swift fans outraged over Ticketmaster issues?
The outrage stems from the fact that Ticketmaster’s site essentially crashed or had major technical issues during presales for the tour. Fans reported endless queues, site outages, and error messages when trying to purchase tickets despite having presale codes for verified fans.
This resulted in many fans being unable to get tickets, even if they had presale codes and were on the site right at the presale start time. Ticketmaster later announced the tour broke their all-time record for most tickets sold for an artist in a single day, yet many fans still didn’t get tickets.
Fans are outraged because this means only a fraction of Swift’s fans were able to get presale tickets, leaving the rest to battle it out during the general public on-sale date. Given Swift’s massive popularity, tickets are sure to sell out quickly, meaning many fans may be left out in the cold despite their best efforts to get tickets early with presale codes.
Examples of fan outrage
- Fans complaining on social media that Ticketmaster crashes kept them from getting tickets despite having codes
- Trending hashtags like #TicketmasterTaylorSwiftScandal
- Swift fans threatening to stop using Ticketmaster entirely
- Media coverage highlighting outraged fan reactions
Why did Ticketmaster have so many issues?
Ticketmaster essentially became overwhelmed by the sheer demand for Taylor Swift tickets. Some key reasons include:
Massive interest in Taylor Swift tour
Taylor Swift has not toured in over 4 years so interest in her tour is enormous. Her popularity has also grown even more in that time with hit albums like Lover and Folklore. With interest so high, website traffic overloaded Ticketmaster’s servers.
Too many presale codes
In an effort to give more fans early access, Ticketmaster reportedly gave out 3.5 million presale codes for the tour. This resulted in too many fans hammering the site all at once during presale and crashing systems.
Bots and scalpers overloading the system
Bots and scalpers trying to scoop up tickets to resell only made matters worse. These automated systems overloaded Ticketmaster’s servers even more than real fans.
Was this preventable?
While massive demand was inevitable, there are some things that may have prevented the widespread Technical issues:
Staggered presales
Spreading presales over multiple days could have lessened the load on servers.
Limiting presale codes
Capping presale codes to 1 million or less could have helped reduce strain.
Better load testing
Ticketmaster could have load tested systems for peak capacity before the presale.
Captcha system
Using Captcha could have reduced bots overloading the system.
Will there be more tickets later?
Ticketmaster has said there is no waitlist for tickets currently. However, some experts predict more tour dates will likely be added given the demand. There is a possibility more tickets would be released when that happens.
There’s also a chance more tickets could become available closer to show dates if production holds tickets or others return tickets. Scalped tickets may also be resold for lower prices closer to shows if demand dies down.
However, fans shouldn’t get their hopes up too much. The massive demand likely means the tour will sell out quickly and extra tickets will remain scarce.
What can be done going forward?
To avoid similar issues in the future, Ticketmaster needs to learn from this debacle and make improvements including:
| Improvement | Details |
|---|---|
| Updated website capacity | Scale up servers and bandwidth to handle massive traffic surges during high-demand onsales. |
| Better load testing | Thoroughly test site capacity before major onsales. |
| Staggered presales | Spread presales over multiple days to lighten per-day loads. |
They also need to work closely with artists like Taylor Swift to find the right balance with presale ticket quantities and managing extremely high fan demand.
Conclusion
In conclusion, Ticketmaster’s website issues during Taylor Swift ticket presales stemmed from the perfect storm of massive demand, too many presale codes, and bots overloading the system. While demand was unavoidable, better preparation like scaled up capacity, load testing, and staggered presales could have possibly prevented the mass technical failures.
Moving forward, Ticketmaster needs to take what they learn here to improve their systems to gracefully handle the next time an artist with Taylor Swift’s popularity goes on tour. And artists may need to work with them to find the right presale ticket strategy to give fans a fair chance at getting seats.
While many Taylor Swift fans are understandably outraged over what transpired, there is still hope more tickets may become available over time. Fans may just have to be persistent and get a bit lucky to still secure seats to what is sure to be an incredible tour.
