March 17th marked the beginning of the long-awaited Eras Tour headlined by Taylor Swift. The first show took place in Glendale, Arizona, or, at the time called Swift City, Era-zona. The U.S. leg of the tour will span from March 17 to August 09 crossing twenty cities with fifty-two dates. While the magnitude of the tour is astronomical, acquiring the tickets proved to be what Swift herself called “several bear attacks”.

Ticketmaster is the number one method of acquiring tickets for concerts, sporting events, fairs, and theater productions due to their extensive contracts with venue sites. For the Eras Tour, Ticketmaster had fans register for presale codes respective to each show. From there, the night before the presale began, select fans would receive a code to access the sale and purchase a maximum of six tickets. The first mistake began with Ticketmaster assigning 1.5 million codes and only planning on releasing two million tickets, and with each code accessing six tickets, presale codes outnumbered the available supply. Subsequently, a snowball of mistakes began. During the presale, consumers would be randomly entered into a queue and asked to wait to enter the purchasing room. Because Ticketmaster did not require the code at entry, many people who did not receive codes entered the queue crashing the site. Ticketmaster also employed bot-detecting software to prevent robots and scammers from purchasing tickets. Instead of removing bots, the software malfunctioned and removed fans from the purchasing website and kicked them to the end of the queue. Georgia Howard, a junior and avid Swiftie, describes her experience as “horrible, horrendous, and emotionally damaging”. 

Despite the difficulties obtaining tickets, Taylor Swift amounted 69,000 attendees at the opening night of the tour, surpassing Madonna’s Sticky and Sweet Tour. Another record passed for Taylor Swift was her three-hour-long setlist containing forty-four songs. Of the songs, fans found it surprising that there were no permanent songs from Swift’s self-titled album and only one song from her album Speak Now. It also wouldn’t be true Swift fashion without surprise songs for each show. So far, she has featured songs from her debut album, evermore, folklore, Red, and Fearless. A student attending Swift’s concert on April 29th states, “She’s probably going to play High Infidelity, but I’m hoping she plays The Story of Us.” 

Whether you acquired tickets or not, you can enjoy all the new content Swift provides online.