Can We Ever Get Out of Our Abusive Relationship with Ticketmaster?
A deep dive into the ticketing company that everyone hates
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If you’re like me and live in Canada, or more specifically Ontario, you were probably very excited when Taylor Swift FINALLY announced 6 shows of her Eras tour in Toronto.
Like me, you probably also registered for Ticketmaster’s “Verified Fan” program to access the pre-sale as soon as you heard.
And like me, you were crushed when you were waitlisted.
The Swiftie fandom was quick to notice how few people had been given the coveted accesses codes for the sale. Theories swirled. Grumpy jokes were made. But no one really knew why until the numbers came out.
31 million accounts registered for the pre-sale.
That’s almost the entire population of Canada.
With 31 million accounts vying for roughly 300,000 tickets, there was about a 1% chance of getting a code for the pre-sale.
And a 0% of getting tickets at face value if you didn’t make it in at all.
There are many things you could blame for this.
1) Americans rushing to get tickets for the Toronto show, even though they’ve had the entire first leg of the tour all to themselves and Canadians might not have been able to afford to go to one of those shows.
(I’d just like to note that of the almost 150 shows Taylor is doing for this tour only 6 of them are in Canada, which is 4% of her shows during the tour)
2) Taylor Swift only added 6 Canadian shows (so far) when Canadians have been crying out for dates since the beginning.
3) These 6 shows are (at the moment) the closing shows of the tour. And, while I don’t believe that Taylor is going to end her epic tour in Toronto, it likely caused an influx of people wanting to potentially see the final shows.
4) There are no legal protections against resellers. While it is technically illegal in Ontario to resell tickets that aren’t in the seller’s possession, I doubt it’s actually enforced considering ticket markets like StubHub allow sellers to list tickets without providing proof of possession.
