CNN
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When Julia Thomas woke up at her home in Cleveland last Saturday, she spontaneously decided to drive 15 hours to the Taylor Swift concert that night in Nashville, picking up her sister in Cincinnati along the way. But they were missing one thing: tickets.
Like so many Swift fans, she he couldn’t get tickets at Ticketmaster when they went on sale last fall, nor could he afford four figures price indicated for them on resale sites. About halfway through, however, her sister found $350 floor seats after updating several Swift-focused Twitter accounts: Ticketmaster had just dropped a handful of last-minute tickets at face value on their website.
“Seriously, we were very lucky,” he told CNN. “We got to Nashville about an hour before the concert was to start.”
Thomas is one of the many devoted fans who closely monitor a combination of Twitter accounts dedicated to alerting fans when Ticketmaster releases a new batch of Swift tickets after the initial sale.
Ticket drops are not new. These are apparently due to extra seats being added to a venue or tickets being returned. But these releases have become something of an obsession among Swift’s most devoted fans, who struggle to find tickets for the artist in the face of Ticketmaster’s broader ticket shambles.
Ticketmaster has come under scrutiny for manipulating online sales of the megastar’s latest tour., in an era where it already utterly dominates the live events industry, leaving few if any alternatives. In November, “Verified Fans” were sent a pre-sale code, but when sales began, high demand bogged down the website and millions of Swifties were unable to obtain a ticket. Pre-sale tickets for Capital One cardholders generated similar frustration, and Ticketmaster later canceled sales to the general public, citing “extraordinarily high demand” and “insufficient remaining ticket inventory”.
In testimony before Congress, Chairman and CFO of Ticketmaster’s parent company, Live Nation, Joe Berchtold blamed the ticketing incident on the bots. He too He emphasized that Ticketmaster does not set ticket prices, does not determine the number of tickets that go on sale, and that “in most cases, ticketing and service fees are set by venues,” not Ticketmaster.
Ticketmaster and Live Nation are at the moment face a lawsuit of Swift fans across the country for “illegal conduct,” with the plaintiffs claiming the ticket giant violated antitrust and other laws. A preliminary hearing was held in March; Ticketmaster has denied the allegations.
Millions of fans still can’t buy tickets. In recent weeks, however, Ticketmaster has been sending out more verified fan codes to people who were originally selected in the pre-sale to buy their leftover tickets. For people without codes, Ticketmaster also does routine ticket deliveries before shows.
It’s not uncommon, however, for thousands of fans to be trying to secure the same tickets at the same time. Sometimes bots and scalpers buy the seats and repost them on third-party sites like StubHub in a matter of minutes.
Ticketmaster did not respond to a request for comment on its ticket drops.
But that doesn’t deter Swift fans. Some spend hours searching for tickets online and driving long distances to reach concert venues without a ticket in hand, even if they risk ending up in heartbreak.
Molly Ramsey, an 18-year-old fan from Bristol, Tennessee, said she recently stumbled upon the Twitter account @erastourticks, who often tweets about Ticketmaster crashes. “My family [last weekend] I took a chance driving the 5 hours to Nashville to see if we could get face value tickets,” he said.
After almost nine hours of updating Ticketmaster, he secured four tickets just before the show started. “We were sitting outside the stadium while the starters were playing, but as soon as our payment was made, it was an out-of-body experience,” he said. “My sister started screaming and dancing.”
In a nod to Swift’s hit song “Anti-Hero” and the rush to find tickets, the Twitter account, which has around 22,000 followers, recently tweeted:: “It must be exhausting to always be rooting for the anti-hero aka @Ticketmaster”.
A similar site, @concertleaks, has been connecting its 62,000 followers with last-minute Swift tickets. The account was originally created years ago to post concert set lists, merchandise, and tickets for various artists, but has evolved to help connect fans with ticket delivery as well.
Other The Twitter account @ErasTourResell, which has 120,000 followers, has gained significant momentum by working with scalpers who want to sell their tickets at face value. The account is run by longtime friends Courtney Johnston, Channette Garay and Angel Richards. The 20-something trio aims to make Swift tickets as accessible as possible for fans without them overpaying or getting ripped off.
“So far we have posted between 2,700 and 3,000 tickets, all at face value,” the trio said in a Twitter DM conversation. “It’s really, really gratifying to see these tickets being given out to real fans at face value when the resale market has incredible prices with people earning three times as much. It’s also been amazing meeting people who follow the account at shows, especially if the only reason they were able to attend was through our account.”
They spend hours, between work and school, checking the daily shipments to make sure the tickets are real. The group encourages buyers to request video proof of tickets, only pay through Paypal for goods and services due to its protection plan, and never pay more than face value. (They also said that they don’t make any money from the process and that they do it only to help their fellow Swifties, but they do have a Ko-Fi account where people can donate funds for food or coffee.)
“Surprisingly, the vetting process has gone immensely smoothly and smoothly because we now know what an incomplete screen recording looks like or what a spoofed or hacked email might look like,” the group said. “It’s about being able to capture the super-small details: what color an image is supposed to look like, what link is clickable, where that link is supposed to take you, what message is supposed to appear at a certain point” .
But getting these tickets is not easy. After a ticket alert is posted on their Twitter page, many users say they never hear from the sellers, and it’s unclear how they select a buyer from the hundreds of fans who contact them.
“It’s definitely gotten more difficult with the increase in our fan base,” the friends behind @ErasTourResell told CNN. “Some [sellers pick] based on first direct message and mention, and others are looking for someone with a heartwarming story, so it really varies. Having our notifications turned on helps as we tend to do a little warning and tease before posting most posts.”
Beyond Twitter, many fans are turning to sites like Reddit, including R/Taylor Swift’s page, for play-by-play details on Ticketmaster installments. Some say they have seen them multiple times throughout the day, but most often around 30 minutes before a show starts. (Tickets have even turned up an hour after the show.) Others suggest using Apple Pay to speed up the checkout process and avoid losing tickets when entering credit card information.
Despite these massive efforts, not all fans find luck online
Katy Blackman, 33, of Birmingham, Alabama, said she spent all day at a Nashville hotel last weekend cooling down the room. She only once managed to place a single ticket in her online shopping cart, but she disappeared before she could pay.
Still, he made his way to Nissan Stadium that night and stood in the parking lot alongside hundreds of other ticketless fans trying to get in. When the lights dimmed minutes before Swift was due to take the stage, the crowd dispersed; she was almost the only one left, still refreshing Ticketmaster.
“All my searching and combining of Ticketmaster and resale sites was useless,” he said. “But then all of a sudden this random girl came running up to me seconds before she walked in and was like, “Hey, do you want to come in with me?”
The stranger had just gotten last minute tickets and had an extra one to sell. “A miracle happened,” Blackman said. “My new friend and I sing every song. We cry, we dance, we hug. It was absolutely worth it to get there.”