With the quick approach of concert season, people flood Ticketmaster and other ticket-selling sites in hopes of gaining access to their favorite artists’ shows. However, this environment has quickly become toxic as queues fill with foreign bots and “fake” fans scramble to buy tickets, later reselling them for as much as twenty times the original price. Leaving “true” fans with mediocre seats costing upwards of $400 for nose-bleed sections, these ticket websites have received a tremendous amount of backlash by fans and artists alike.
A prime example of this ticket reselling scandal is Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour, in which resellers such as StubHub swarmed the Ticketmaster site and resold the show’s tickets for exorbitant prices. Close to 3.5 million users signed up for the website’s Verified Fan presale program, but when tickets went on sale on November 15, 2022, the site crashed within an hour, and many users were logged out or frozen in the virtual queue. 2.4 million tickets were sold despite the crash, Ticketmaster attributing it to heavy site traffic.
Likewise, this year, many mainstream artists like Bruno Mars, BTS, and Ariana Grande have announced tours that many fans are anxious to purchase tickets for. On social media, fans are posting videos saying, “If you can’t sing all the lyrics to ____, then don’t even think about buying tickets,” or, “Preparing my wallet for Ticketmaster sales tomorrow.” It seems as though, recently, there’s been an influx of fans of artists who choose to attend concerts just to attend a concert and sign up for artist presale, inflating prices. And while there’s no distinct rule against this, “true” fans have grown agitated toward the excessive amount of people in presale queues, saying presale should guarantee tickets for “real” fans.
But the term “real” fan is a controversy in itself, as there is no real definition of a “real” fan. Could it be knowing the lyrics to every single one of an artist’s songs? Or maybe listening to an artist since they began their music career? But there’s a multitude of fans who just get into listening to an artist’s music right before they announce a tour, or even fans who get into their music because they announced a tour. It’s almost like people who characterize themselves as “true” fans are just toxic ones who feel only they have a right to purchase tickets, leaving new fans to feel inferior to those they see online.
But I think the tendencies we see from fans online are directly related to the reseller bots crashing websites, as the stream of bots is causing ticket prices to skyrocket, leaving fans with close to nothing to choose from. Although Ticketmaster says they have bot detection, time and time again, they prove that fans can’t trust it and can and will continue to hesitate using the website. Even while artists themselves have called out resale bots and the outrageous prices, we have yet to see a ticket sale in which the majority of fans aren’t left disappointed and without tickets. As more artists work with their teams to lower ticket prices to face value and fans continue to call out the holes in ticket sale websites, we can only hope that it will make a true difference in the future.