The Eras Tour: Controversy and Chaos

Taylor Swift’s upcoming Eras Tour is the most highly anticipated event of 2023, but the singer and Ticketmaster face backlash due to controversy in the ticket purchase process.

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Photo via Eva Rinaldi under the Creative Commons license

In the time of Taylor Swift’s “Speak Now” days, the young Miss Swift is captured with a slight shrug and a playful smirk. Photographer, Eva Rinaldi, caught the perfect moment of Swift performing for the Sydney, Australia concert.

10:00 a.m. on Nov. 15, the great war of getting concert tickets began.

But the oddity is, this battle was not even considered the official sale.

Taylor Swift and Ticketmaster have been working closely together for Swift’s major upcoming album tour: The Eras Tour. To put in perspective how substantial it is, her last tour happened in 2018 for her sixth studio album Reputation.

Swift planned for a Lover Fest tour – named after her seventh studio album Lover – but the concept got postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

During the pandemic, Swift released two more albums: Folklore and Evermore, these two albums follow a distinct yet tied-together vision from her prior album.

Devoted fans of Swift harbored an extended amount of anticipation to see the artist in all her glory on stage.

The Eras Tour was announced on Nov. fourth – and within two weeks of the announcement, on Nov. 15, the particular date was planned to be the day of presale ticket queues.

Swift was adamant that her fans get tickets fairly, so she and Ticketmaster came to the solution of a “special” invitation to the TaylorSwiftTix presale.

The day before the presale, Nov. 14, many fans received an email from Ticketmaster detailing information about the event. Within this email, one gets “specially selected” to choose the tour dates you specifically wish to attend.

Morning of the presale, at 10:00 a.m., fans of Swift would wait in queues that included a process of three phases before the public could pick seats.

“The lobby,” the “Waiting room,” and the anxious waiting in the “Queue.”

As Swifties began to log on to the Ticketmaster website, the process of it all felt painfully long. Most of Swift’s fans said they waited for hours, and some couldn’t go on Ticketmaster due to the extensive number of site users.

“I couldn’t even get into the line because the website crashed,” says sophomore Kyleigh Hampshire.

On our official Instagram account of The Beacon, as a staff, we posted a poll to see the array of results on whether tickets were purchased from students, staff, and the community of Dallastown.

The results we earned appeared very divided.

More than half got concert tickets and are ecstatic, but a majority didn’t get the chance to purchase tickets as well.

“I was really upset because getting tickets was a big deal for me, and it just felt like the chances of me getting tickets were eliminated at that point,” said Hampshire.

Two days later, on Nov. 17, Ticketmaster published a tweet on Twitter regarding the public sale.

“Due to extraordinarily high demands on ticketing systems and insufficient remaining ticket inventory to meet that demand, tomorrow’s public on-sale for Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour has been cancelled,” stated the official Twitter account of Ticketmaster.

Social media erupted from that statement.

Her fans felt the emotions of disappointment, outrage, and betrayal.

Currently, the media has subsided but remains a sore topic for Swifties.

The Temple News – the newspaper of Temple University – covered the fiasco and addressed the struggles of our local “Swifties” at Temple and what they had endured getting tickets.

Swift fans in Philadelphia are hoping it won’t be a “Cruel Summer” after chaos ensued during the Eras Tour presale on Ticketmaster.

— Reporter of The Temple News, Sara Ayesha -Shakir

Ironically Swift’s latest album Midnights – the 3am Edition, includes a song named “The Great War.”

Fans began associating the song with the presale as “the great war” due to the high pressure it emitted.

Regardless of the controversy and chaos, as Taylor Swift said in the song: “I will always be yours, Cause we survived the Great War,” indeed, she will always be ours because she is the acclaimed Miss Americana singer.