For Taylor Swift fans, the announcement of her new tour was a breath of fresh air after the artists hadn’t toured since her 2017 album Reputation. When she released her new album in October 2022, Midnights, it was a moment of exciting anticipation for the fanbase who had been patiently waiting, especially considering the fact that her last tour Loverfest was canceled due to the global pandemic.

Ticketmaster has been the main hub for ticket sales ever since its merger with Live Nation in 2010. Live Nation, an entertainment company, holds Ticketmaster with an iron fist and controls all ticket sales. Taylor Swift and her team chose Ticketmaster to be their main source of selling tickets. Swift also chose to participate in a Verified Fan Presale, where fans can sign up and hope to receive a code allowing them access to get tickets before the General Onsale. However, while the Verified Fan Presale was supposed to make sure that only fans got tickets, it ended up being the main reason why most fans did not get tickets. Ticketmaster is notorious for crashing almost every time an artist’s tickets go on sale, but with Taylor Swift’s presale, it was the most unsuccessful presale to date.

Taylor Swift fans were under the impression that if you purchased merchandise from her online stores, or if you had tickets from the canceled Loverfest tour, you were to gain a boost in the queue line, to give real fans priority over scalpers and bots. However, not a single person received said boost. Swift seemed to use that to her advantage to gain more sales on her website.

Not only did those fans not receive a boost in the queue line, but the line to get tickets was so long and grueling that some fans waited in line for five plus hours, only to be met with a screen telling them all tickets were sold out, or they were astronomically priced. Because of the traffic to the website, Ticketmaster moved some presales to the following day to try and keep the chaos contained.

Ticketmaster sold nearly all of the available tickets in the presale–and announced the next day that they were canceling the general sale. This meant that if a fan didn’t get tickets during the presale, they had no chance of getting tickets anymore.

Ticketmaster claimed to have not expected so much traffic on their website (despite knowing how popular Taylor Swift is, and how much money her previous tour engrossed) and that they were trying to get the website back up and running. At that point, there were reportedly 14 million fans signing onto Ticketmaster trying to get tickets–despite only roughly 1.5 million presale codes being released.

So, how did this happen? What went wrong? Who is to blame?

It’s not a simple answer. There were a myriad of things that affected the sale, and made it impossible for people to get tickets. Starting with the most obvious: Ticketmaster claimed to have expected the mayhem to their website, but were grossly underprepared. They allowed people who did not have presale codes to wait in line with people who did have codes, allowing millions of people who didn’t have codes into the waiting room to get tickets, and pushing those who did have codes back further in line, prompting them to not get the very sought after tickets.

The other problem is dynamic pricing, which makes tickets more expensive when the demand gets higher and higher. Artists and their team choose to opt into dynamic pricing when planning out the tour–meaning Taylor and her team chose to have the tickets soar to insanely high prices within just a few minutes of them going on sale.

Based on a survey from slate.com, 70.4% of all fans who were actively in line for the presale did not receive a boost at all. As much as botched ticket selling might seem like a laughable problem,on Dec. 2, lawyers sued Ticketmaster on behalf of two dozen fans who were under the impression that the presale was going to be for Loverfest ticket holders and people who purchased items from Taylor Nation.

“Only those individuals who satisfied either of these conditions would be allowed into the presale via a code as a ‘verified’ fan,” says the complaint. “Plaintiffs relied upon and accepted such terms and conditions, thereby purchasing merchandise and/or accepting the benefit from the canceled ‘Lover’s Fest.’ ” The Department of Justice also opened an antitrust investigation into Live Nation, possibly reassessing the merger that it allowed in 2010.

It is essential to look into Taylor Swift and her team’s involvement in the problem as well. Swift issued a statement a few days after the fiasco saying that Ticketmaster assured her and her team multiple times that they were able to handle the traffic to the website, which they ultimately could not. But, Ticketmaster has now allowed fans another chance to purchase two tickets by requesting through an email (if you did not receive a boost in the line and did not buy tickets) to purchase tickets. Now, many fans were capable of getting tickets without having to wait in the hassle of the queue line. Why they weren’t using this method in the first place is a mystery.

Ticketmaster is a monopoly, and it always has been since its merger with Live Nation. It’s hard to get affordable tickets, and it’s hard for artists to even tour. Ticketmaster is able to leverage their power and use it to their advantage–basically saying, “we have the power to do what we want, and how we want.”

There’s less room for negotiation between artists and Ticketmaster, and less chances for true fans to get tickets. With Ticketmaster being the largest ticket hub in the world, it’s hard for any artist to make sure that they’re getting money, too. With many lawsuits in the air, the market of ticket selling might possibly, when this all sorts out, change for the better.