Tickets for Taylor Swift’s Eras tour went on secondary ticketing sites for thousands of pounds within minutes of going on presale on Monday (10 July), leaving many of the singer’s fans unable to afford to attend.
Sites selling tickets crashed, with nearly 40,000 people joining the online queue on when the presale for the US pop star’s London and Edinburgh shows began at 11am. Early access was granted to fans who had pre-ordered Swift’s album Midnights.
On reselling site Viagogo, at the time of writing, tickets for London’s Wembley Stadium show were on sale for as much as £3,352.
The original sale price for a standing ticket in the front row was £172.25.
“So @taylorswift13 tickets went on sale and are already selling for thousands on resale ticket sites!! How is that actually fair!!??” posted one fan on Twitter.
“So they claimed that fans would get tickets and not scalpers yet on all the re seller sites tickets are thousands. Yeah great job. Looks like me, a fan, won’t be going,” wrote another.
A third shared: “So much for Ticketmaster trying to stop resale tickets. #TaylorSwift tickets are on Viagogo, some for extortionate prices, some saying face value (I call bull****, as I’ve just bought tickets in better seats for WAY less). Taking tix away from true fans!”
Some fans also complained of being kicked out of the queue by Ticketmaster.
“I was first in the queue for Taylor Swift tickets and Ticketmaster kicked me out of the queue for literally no reason,” one fan tweeted. “There goes my chance at tickets.”
Scottish National Party MP Gavin Newlands said he had experienced the same issue on Ticketmaster while trying to secure tickets for his daughter.
“Just as I got in, you kicked me out with an error,” he wrote. “Now back in queue at 18,000 odd, with no chance of a ticket. Super.”
The Independent has contacted Swift’s representative and Ticketmaster for comment.
Taylor Swift— (AP)
On Friday (7 July), Swift released the album Speak Now (Taylor’s Version), a re-recording of her original 2010 album. It is the third of six records she plans to rerelease in order to regain financial and legal control of her back catalogue.
While the majority of the songs on Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) are re-recordings of past songs, there are also six previously unheard songs on the tracklist, which Swift had written around the same time.
The six “vault” tracks on the record are: “Electric Touch” (featuring Fall Out Boy), “When Emma Falls in Love”, “I Can See You”, “Castles Crumbling” (featuring Hayley Williams), “Foolish One”, and “Timeless”.
On the new release, Swift took the opportunity to alter one controversial lyric in one of the album’s original tracks “Better Than Revenge”. The original lyric has previously been accused of slutshaming or being sexist, because of the line: “She’s an actress, whoa / She’s better known for the things that she does on the mattress, whoa.”
In the new version, after “she’s an actress”, Swift now sings: “He was a moth to the flame, she was holding the matches.”
You can read The Independent’s four-star review of Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) here.
