Why Taylor Swift’s fans are fighting against Ticketmaster?

Taylor Swift announced that the “The Era Tour” would start soon, and fans who ordered copies of her new album Midnight before the release date would be eligible to sign up to get early tickets to 52 of her US tour dates, and the pre-sale would be processed in Ticketmaster — a professional ticket selling website.

We can imagine how excited her fans would be, because Taylor Swift’s last tour was before the appearance of Covid-19, and during these years, she produced three new albums breaking multiple Spotify records.

However, the tickets selling became terrible. Loyal fans who had been promised tickets for the touring shows encountered faulty access codes and long delays on websites that could not cope with overwhelming demand.

The result: Millions of people tried to get tickets, and many verified fans did not buy tickets successfully when the site crashed. The presale was eventually cancelled.

But, Ticketmaster can completely avoid what happened by great preparedness. According to the search volume and appeal of Taylor Swift in the United States, Ticketmaster should be fully prepared for a large number of users to log in to the website, rather than treating this matter as other concert ticket sales. I think Ticketmaster’s management completely underestimated Taylor Swift’s influence, which led to them not being fully prepared to face a large number of fans, which caused angry user sentiment.

Ticketmaster’s PR team issued a statement a few hours after the incident, apologizing to Taylor and all her fans and explaining everything about the collapse of the online ticketing website, including a chart showing a sharp rising in website traffic to justify the ticketing site’s crash.

The way of dealing with the crisis comforted customers to a certain extent, and at the same time, they did release the chart to prove the traffic of the website, but judging from the results, I personally think that the explanation of Ticketmaster did not comfort the emotions of fans and users very well. There are still loud complaints pervading social media.

As of this writing, we can see Taylor Swift fans taking Ticketmaster to court. Fans use legal weapons to protect their rights and address these unfair treatments.