This is How It Always Is: Taylor Swift, Ticketmaster, and The Game

On a freezing cold March morning in Michigan in the year 2000, I sat in the car with one of my oldest friends, waiting for Marshall Fields to open so we could buy tickets to see Smashing Pumpkins.

Collectively, we’d seen them five times (he’d been to three shows and I’d been to two). We were both huge fans. We wanted to make sure we got tickets, and good seats, because the venue we were pursuing wasn’t very big, and we didn’t want to miss out. There were only a few other people there, but just prior to opening, the store staff did a lottery drawing to see who got to enter the building first. We met a couple of girls who thought they were also huge fans, but had only started following the Pumpkins after the 1998 Adore album. We scoffed at them in the car and gloated when one of us (I forget which one) was drawn as the first person in line. Clearly, we were the bigger fans anyway and deserved priority ticket-purchasing. Especially since, like I said, it was freezing cold outside.

This is all I could think about as I sat staring at a Ticketmaster online queue for close to seven hours on Tuesday.

I’ve been to a lot of concerts. I like to consider myself a professional ticket-purchaser. I’m a young Gen-X-er and I’m not shy about heralding the shows I’ve been fortunate enough to see in my forty-three years on this earth. I saw The Bangles and Huey Lewis and The News in the 80s. I saw Richard Marx in the 90s. I’ve seen the Pumpkins five times. Pearl Jam twice. Lenny Kravitz twice. The Red Hot Chili Peppers twice. Foo Fighters. The Black Crowes. Billy Joel. Tori Amos. Kid Rock. Stone Temple Pilots, when Scott Weiland was still alive. Bon Jovi. Christina Aguilera. Destiny’s Child. Weezer. And those are just all of the “big acts” I can think of - I’ve seen many, many more shows of lesser-known artists. I waited in line for 3-ish hours in the summer of 1999 with hundreds of screaming girls younger than me for the chance to see Backstreet Boys at the height of their career that fall. We secured nosebleed seats, and they opened the show by descending from the rafters on hoverboards, and it was absolutely amazing.

Ticket purchasing used to be a communal experience for the loyal, like the one my friend and I had talking with the (clearly lesser) Pumpkins fans in line on that freezing cold morning in March, 2000. It’s not anymore. I’m not here to lament any of that. Technology changes, the world changes, and society moves forward. I don’t want to be the old lady grumbling about the way things used to be, and truthfully these days I’d much rather wait in line on a website in my sweatpants anyway, with a hot cup of coffee next to me.

However, I am here to lament the entitlement I saw all over the internet in the aftermath of the Taylor Swift Eras Tour Presale Debacle. And to issue a warning to amateur ticket-purchasers.

Because, this is how it always is. And this is how it will always be. 

Since computers were invented, Ticketmaster has always had a monopoly on ticket-purchasing. Pearl Jam got super pissed about this in the 90s, to the point of boycotting Ticketmaster momentarily, and taking them to court. It didn’t work, and even Eddie Vedder, The King Of Being Pissed About Stuff, eventually caved to their monopoly. Their merger with Live Nation in 2010 didn’t help much, creating one narrow tunnel through which to make attempts to see your favorite shows and artists live at least once before you die.

In-person ticket-purchasing, even without the internet, was always a bit of a mess. Because, even if you were one of five people waiting in line at your local mall, you never knew how many other people were waiting in line at other malls across the country. Even if you were first in line where you were, sometimes you’d get to the counter to buy your tickets, and they were sold out. Or the computer or network was frozen. Or the ticket machine was broken (but oh, I still remember that satisfying ka-chunk! noise it made when it spit out my tickets). Or people were buying tickets out from under you while your customer service agent clickety-clacked on her computer, or pulled out her paper map of the venue to show you which seats were still available. 

Second shows opened up as a surprise, sometimes while you were waiting in line, and only once the first show had sold out. Sometimes the show sold out when you were three people away from the ticket counter. This has always been a thing. The only real difference now is that we can see it all.

The internet introduced two complications to the ticket-purchasing process that made it worse: 1) It made the process much easier, so it is thereby now open to everyone, even the people who aren’t willing to wake up early and wait in the freezing cold for their tickets, and 2) Bots and scalpers abound on the internet, which makes their job of scooping up loads of tickets and reselling them at astronomical prices much, much easier as well. It’s unfortunate. But it’s not surprising, and it’s just another factor that’s been introduced to an already unfair process.

Because ticket-purchasing is just unfair. It just is. Ticketmaster doesn’t care how loyal of a Taylor Swift fan you are. They don’t care if you got a presale code with 20,000 other people. They don’t care if you got a ‘boost’ from the online Taylor Swift merch store, or if you had tickets to Lover Fest (which got canceled during the pandemic, and a lot of Swifties missed out). They don’t even care if their server is overloaded or if your online queue froze after you sat staring at it for two hours. Just like they didn’t care if I stood outside in the freezing cold in the early aughts. They just want all of your money.

We see it now, before our very eyes, which is the only difference. The flaws in the system are much easier to identify when we are the ones dealing with the frozen computer or the overloaded server or watching scalpers immediately post for sale online the tickets that were just in my online cart thirty seconds ago. It’s much easier to tweet directly at Ticketmaster to fix the problems (which, see above, they do not care about). And it’s much easier to air our anger on the internet for everyone to see.

It’s all a very unfair system, but this is how it always is. Ticket-purchasing has always been unfair. It’s The Hunger Games. And it’s always been The Hunger Games. And all of the presales and secret codes and boosts and tiered ticket sales won’t change that. It’s a process for the scrappy, and not for the faint of heart. Eat or be eaten.

Consider this a warning, Swifties, and anyone else falling for Ticketmaster’s game: Codes and boosts and everything else are all sweet promises for which inexperienced ticket-purchasers fall. But that’s the game. Ticketmaster wants your money, and your anxiety, and everything in between. They participate in the game of creating the demand, so that you will participate in the game of paying their outrageous prices and fees for a show they want you to believe is sold out.

Because, the thing is, Tuesday, November 15, was only the presale. There were only a number of tickets (about a quarter at each venue) reserved for the presale. There’s another presale on Wednesday, November 16 (for Capital One credit card holders), and the regular tickets go on sale on Friday, November 18. You have time, and there are plenty of seats left, because this is a stadium tour. But last night, my TikTok feed was full of crying Swifties, who thought for sure they were going to get great tickets, because of their loyalty to the fandom and because Ticketmaster told them in an email the night before that they had been “chosen.”

Precious fans of music, I do hope that you all get tickets to see your show of choice, and that you have a marvelous time. But you are not chosen. No one is chosen here. This is how it always is. And this is how it will always be. The server will probably crash again during the second presale, and again during the general sale. The system is unfair, and broken, and seemingly can’t be fixed, because nobody wants to fix it. And that absolutely sucks. But Pearl Jam couldn’t defeat the beast of Ticketmaster in the 90s, and I assure you that you won’t do it, thirty years later.