Taylor Swift fan "embarrassed" after paying $5500 for The Eras Tour tickets at resale

21 November 2022, 15:59

Taylor Swift teams up with Captial One for The Eras tour presale

By Katie Louise Smith

"It wasn't something fun, like it was supposed to be. I feel guilty. I feel like I did something impulsive in panic mode."

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If your favourite artist's tour was sold out, but you desperately wanted to see them play, how much would you be willing to pay to get a ticket? Couple of hundred? A grand? More?

Speaking to Business Insider, Taylor Swift fan Paige admitted that she was "embarrassed" after paying $5500 for two re-sale tickets to The Eras Tour. And now she regrets buying them.

If you've been anywhere near the internet recently, then you'll have probably seen all the chaos that happened with the Taylor's Eras Tour presale. Over 3.5 million people registered to get a pre-sale code from Ticketmaster's Verified Fan system. Only 1.5 million fans were sent codes to access the pre-sale, but due to "bot attacks as well as fans who didn’t have codes", Ticketmaster reports that 3.5 billion (!) total system requests were recorded during the pre-sale.

As a result, fans were stuck in a virtual queue for hours and pages crashed at check out. In the end, 2.4 million tickets were sold during the pre-sale alone. Ticketmaster later cancelled the general sale due to "insufficient remaining ticket inventory to meet that demand".

Fans were furious, and even Taylor herself was furious...

Taylor Swift fans ends up paying $5500 for re-sale Eras Tour tickets. Picture: Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic, Taylor Swift

In a statement, Ticketmaster said "all 2 million tickets for the Verified Fan onsale were sold to Verified Fans. Only ticket buyers who were verified were permitted to enter a queue."

The Verified Fan system is meant to ensure that fans get their hands on tickets before bots and re-sellers do. However, shortly after the pre-sale, tickets began popping up on ticket re-sale websites for extortionate amounts of money. Some were even as high as $33,000. (Ticketmaster estimates that less than 5% of the tickets sold have ended up on those secondary sites.)

Paige, who told Business Insider that she has been a fan of Taylor Swift for around 15 years, ended up getting stuck in the paused queue for over three hours and while waiting, she went to StubHub to see if there was any tickets available from re-sellers.

Paige ended up buying two floor seats priced under just $2,000 each. With fees and tax, the total came to just over $5,500.

Taylor Swift's Eras Tour will be her first tour since the Reputation Stadium Tour in 2018. Picture: Getty

She told the outlet that she was excited at first, but now she regrets it.

"I don't feel good to have tickets anymore," she said. "It wasn't something fun, like it was supposed to be. I feel guilty. I feel like I did something impulsive in panic mode, and I am disappointed in Ticketmaster and Live Nation for letting it get to this point of just being a complete frenzy."

Paige continued: "Once I realized how many people were impacted by this and how I fed into what resellers do, which is prey on people who are in that panic mode, it didn't feel good anymore. Once I saw the Capital One presale go the exact same way, I felt guilty for having tickets. I felt nauseous that I spent so much."

"I feel like it's a dirty ticket," she added. "Like in the same way getting something in the wrong way would feel bad, it's the same with this. I'm embarrassed I did it, I regret it, and I kind of just wish I had a nosebleed ticket — because I just don't feel like giving in in this way to the resellers was the answer."