Ticketmaster to sell more Taylor Swift ‘Eras’ tour tickets through Verified Fan program
Taylor Swift fans have started to receive new alerts from Ticketmaster’s Verified Fan program – whereby prospective concertgoers are vetted for legitimacy before being allowed to purchase tickets – informing them that a new window for ticket sales would be opening imminently.
Ticketmaster botched their first attempt at selling tickets to Swift’s ‘Eras’ tour, with thousands of fans reporting egregious wait times, website outages, and hyper-inflated prices on resale sites (including Ticketmaster’s own) when they first went live on November 15. The ticketing company later admitted it was buckled by the “historically unprecedented demand” they faced from Swift’s fans, and shut the general sale down altogether.
In a statement of her own, Swift refused to “make excuses” for Ticketmaster, claiming that she and her team “asked them, multiple times, if they could hand this kind of demand” and were “assured they could”. Leaping to her fans’ defense, she continued: “it really pisses me off that a lot of them feel like they went through several bear attacks to get [tickets].”
As reported by Billboard, Ticketmaster will soon offer a pool of fans who missed out on tickets – the size of which is currently unknown – another chance to secure them. A note sent to those fans reads as such: “Congratulations, you have been selected to participate in a limited-time opportunity to request to purchase [two] tickets to Taylor Swift The Eras Tour.
“You were selected for this opportunity because you have been identified as a fan who received a boost during the Verified Fan presale but did not purchase tickets. We apologize for the difficulties you may have experienced, and have been asked by Taylor’s team to create this additional opportunity for you to purchase tickets.”
Ticketmaster has verified the legitimacy of the emails received by fans, noting in a blog post that sale windows will be opened on a city-by-city basis over the next 10 days (ending on Friday December 23).
The North American leg of Swift’s ‘Eras’ tour will begin in Glendale, Arizona next March, running on through to August with a total of 52 shows on the itinerary. It comes in support of the pop star’s 10th album, ‘Midnights’ – which arrived in October and was named by NME as the 12th best album of 2022 – with special guests across the run including Paramore, beabadoobee, Phoebe Bridgers, Girl In Red, MUNA, Haim and more.
The controversy over Ticketmaster’s first sale had political implications, with US lawmakers calling for an investigation into the company. Meanwhile, a Senate-backed antitrust panel has organised a hearing on the lack of competition in the ticketing industry, while two US senators have called on the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to answer for “the steps” it’s taking to “combat the use and operation of bots in the online ticket marketplace”.
Several of Swift’s own fans have mounted their own campaigns to fight back against Ticketmaster, with around three dozen launching an initiative called ‘Vigilante Legal’. A class action lawsuit against Ticketmaster has also been filed, with plaintiffs accusing the company of violating two laws – the California Cartwright Act and the California Unfair Competition Law – during the first Verified Fan pre-sale.
Earlier this month, it was reported that Swift had been in talks to partner with FTX – an embattled cryptocurrency exchange in the midst of bankruptcy – just months before that company collapsed. It’s said that the deal, worth more than $100million (£820,550), would have included an arrangement to have concert tickets minted as NFTs.
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Ellie Robinson
NME
