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Taylor Swift fans have become rookie ticket resellers

Taylor Swift fans have become rookie ticket resellers


Watching Taylor Swift perform live is a dream for millions of her fans. And they go to great lengths to realize it by waiting hours in virtual ticketing queues, shelling out thousands of dollars for seats, and even standing in parking lots outside her concert venues to listen from afar.

But in some ways, “Swifties” may have turned out to be antiheroes. Many of them have become ticket resellers through ticket sites like StubHub, and that’s unleashed chaos in the form of invalid or duplicate tickets and unfulfilled orders. This is why we can’t have nice things, as Swift puts it in one of her hit songs, but in a more general sense.

“We are experiencing record-breaking demand for Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, which is driving an unprecedented number of fan sellers,” StubHub told the Wall Street Journal. The company noted that 70% of Swift’s concert ticket orders on StubHub come from fan sellers rather than ticket brokers, which is double the norm for other live acts. Moreover, about 63% of the Eras Tour orders causing troubles are those sold by inexperienced fan sellers, the Journal reported.

Swift’s long-awaited tour—her first in five years—was a blockbuster from the get-go, when presale tickets went live via ticket seller Ticketmaster in November. At the time, “extraordinarily high demand” caused glitches, ultimately leading to Ticketmaster canceling general ticket sales. Even after the initial outrage among fans was quelled, the appetite for tickets among Swifties remained high. Concert tickets were selling at exorbitant prices—some as high as $45,000.

This time, the deluge of Swift fans managing resale of tickets for the Eras Tour created new hurdles for services including StubHub. Many fans, who are trying ticket reselling for the first time, are not communicating promptly with StubHub about transferring their tickets to buyers, leading the company to prompt buyers to look for new tickets on the platform. Resellers are also listing tickets on multiple platforms and failing to take down postings after the tickets are sold, adding to the confusion on StubHub’s end, the ticketing platform told the Journal.  

For StubHub, the confusion has forced it to pay thousands of dollars…

Click Here to Read the Full Original Article at Fortune | FORTUNE…