Tori: So — quite the traumatic week for Swifties. Did you manage to get tickets to The Eras Tour?

Olivia: I was already a victim of Ticketmaster earlier this year when trying to get Harry Styles tickets so I decided that I wasn’t emotionally stable enough to go through that process again with mother Swift.

Tori: Felt. I managed to receive a code, which ultimately went to waste as I was in class doing group work when the presale started. My sister ended up trying for us with her code, but Ticketmaster kept telling her she wasn’t using the right account — even though she was. Gaslighting feels like a new low, even for Ticketmaster.

Olivia: See, I found out about the whole Ticketmaster code debacle from Busy Philipps’s Instagram story in real time where she had sat her ex husband in her apartment on a little laptop to up her chances of scoring tickets for her children.

Tori: Kim Kelly herself?!

Olivia: The very same. She made it all the way through the queue and then her “Verified Fan” presale code didn’t even work. I feel like once the Busy Philipps is affected we ride at dawn, no?

Tori: If I wasn’t mad before…

Olivia: I had even come to terms with the fact that I was going to wait until the general public sale like a sane person until I received this message from Ticketmaster: “Due to extraordinarily high demands on ticketing systems and insufficient remaining ticket inventory to meet that demand, tomorrow’s public on-sale for Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour has been cancelled.” I actually felt betrayed. 

Tori: I was in the same boat — even hours later once I finally went from a late start in the queue to find zero tickets remaining, I had the knowledge of an impending general sale keeping me going. Surely there should have been a way to make sure the presale only included a portion of the total seats per venue?

Olivia: No, no, that’s logical and fair, and Ticketmaster clearly isn’t into that these days (side eye to dynamic pricing).

Tori: You’re so right — scalpers may get a lot of credit for making the ticket buying process near impossible, but Ticketmaster responding to perceived demand by hiking prices up themselves is arguably becoming an even bigger issue. Remember the whole $5,000 Bruce Springsteen ticket fiasco?

Olivia: Who could forget. I also personally debated paying literal rent prices for a ticket to Harry Styles’s Love On Tour, but decided I’d rather eat than go to Harry’s House — don’t think I wasn’t tempted, though. What makes everything super gross is the fact that the chairman of Live Nation (which owns Ticketmaster, prompting AOC and a couple of Attorneys General from Tennessee and North Carolina to investigate the presale for possible antitrust violations) basically blamed the situation on Swift’s break from touring — which is an odd route to take. 

Tori: Even if everybody in the world wanted a ticket, it was Ticketmaster who decided to implement dynamic pricing, and it was their failure to properly divide tickets which cost us a general sale.

Olivia: USA Today reported that, “The site was supposed to be open to 1.5 million verified fans, but 14 million users – including bots – hit the site,” and that’s honestly just mind-blowingly unacceptable. Swift is right to be, “[pissed] off that a lot of [fans] feel like they went through several bear attacks to get [tickets].”

Tori: It’s been hard to look at Grizz ever since, I can’t lie.