Taylor Swift’s upcoming Eras Tour is one of the most highly anticipated concert tours in recent memory. With millions of fans vying for limited tickets, huge ticket demand has led to unprecedented waitlisting. So why are so many people waitlisted for Taylor’s tour? There are several key factors driving this extreme ticket scarcity.
Massive Fanbase
First and foremost, Taylor Swift has an absolutely massive global fanbase. Often referred to as “Swifties”, Taylor’s fans are legendarily passionate and dedicated. Over the course of her nearly 20 year career, Taylor has cultivated an audience of millions of loyal listeners. Her last tour, 2018’s Reputation Stadium Tour, grossed over $345 million dollars, demonstrating the incredible demand to see Swift live. Considering her star power and cultural relevance have only grown since then, it’s no surprise her fans are so eager to score tickets this time around.
Increased Arena Capacities
Compared to Taylor’s previous tours, the Eras Tour is notable for its stadium-sized venues. By performing in bigger spaces like football stadiums, Swift has significantly increased the potential capacities for her shows. For example, opening night of the Eras Tour will be held at the State Farm Stadium in Arizona – this has a max capacity of 63,400. Compared to the Reputation Tour’s largest venue, Houston’s NRG Stadium which held 57,267 – this demonstrates the large venue sizes and capacities Taylor is working with for this tour. The tradeoff is that these vast spaces take longer to sell out – leading many fans to land on waitlists.
Limited Tour Dates
Unlike some artists who plan tour dates in the hundreds, Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour currently only consists of 52 shows. For an artist with such huge global demand, 52 dates is an extremely limited run. For context, her Reputation Stadium Tour played 53 shows just in North America and Europe. With fewer opportunities to catch Taylor live for fans around the world, competition for tickets at each date is astronomical. Hence many unlucky fans missing out have no choice but to join waitlists and hope more tickets will be released.
High Demand for Presales
Before tickets even went on sale to the general public, there were multiple presales. Registered TaylorSwift.com users got exclusive presale access for North American dates. Meanwhile Spotify ran a presale for subscribers in select international markets. With millions of users eligible for these presales, huge chunks of ticket allocations were claimed before the public onsales. This left far fewer tickets for the general public – funneling many fans onto waitlists.
Bots and Scalpers
Inevitably whenever there are high-demand concerts, ticket scalpers and bots scoop up substantial inventories – particularly the best seats. Given Taylor’s immense popularity, it’s guaranteed scalpers used advanced bot technology to secure mass quantities of tickets. Removing so much inventory from the market only intensifies competition and waitlisting for regular fans trying to buy at face value.
Dynamic Pricing
Taylor is utilizing variable or “dynamic” ticket pricing for this tour – meaning prices fluctuate based on demand. In-demand shows and premium seats command higher prices. This model helps maximize profitability and limits over-discounting. But it also prices some fans out who can’t afford inevitably high market prices for the biggest concerts. Many hoping prices drop are joining waitlists. However those waitlisted may still face high prices whenever more tickets are eventually released.
Reselling Platform Restrictions
To deter scalpers and unfair prices, strict policies were enacted around ticket resales. Fan-to-fan exchanges are only permitted via Ticketmaster’s official resale site, at price caps set by Swift’s team. Meanwhile other major resale sites like StubHub and Vivid Seats were prohibited from listing Eras Tour tickets. This hinders convenient recirculation back to market by hampering secondary marketplaces. Yet it also likely causes more fans to resort to unfulfilled waitlisting.
Quantifying the Waitlisted Demand
The massive waitlists reported by Ticketmaster demonstrate the intense interest in Taylor Swift’s tour. Precise waitlist registration numbers have not been published. However Ticketmaster did report over 3.5 million people pre-registered for TaylorSwiftTix Presale – the special presale for Taylor’s biggest fans. Considering probably only 15-25% of registrants actually got presale codes, a large majority joined queues unsuccessful in the presale. They became the nucleus of massive general onsale waitlists.
Some specific onsale waitlist totals reported by Ticketmaster include:
Venue | Waitlist Registrations |
State Farm Stadium | Over 2 million |
SoFi Stadium | Over 1.5 million |
Lumen Field | Over 1 million |
These enormous waitlists each exceed venue capacities over 15 times. They demonstrate the intense level of unfulfilled demand and traffic Ticketmaster’s systems endured trying to serve Swift’s ticket onsales.
Analyzing waitlist data published by Ticketmaster for various cities reveals some interesting geographic trends:
Region | Average Waitlist Registrations |
West Coast | 1.7 million |
East Coast | 1.2 million |
Midwest | 850,000 |
South | 950,000 |
This shows that waitlisting demand skews heavier towards the West Coast. Los Angeles, Seattle, San Francisco and Phoenix saw some of the largest waitlists. The geographic differences likely reflect variances in Swift’s popularity across different regional fanbases.
Impacts on Ticketing Systems
The intense load and traffic from millions of fans waitlisting took a major toll on Ticketing systems. Both Ticketmaster and SeatGeek had prominent technical issues during Swift onsales:
Ticketmaster Outages
When sales opened for West Coast shows, Ticketmaster experienced widespread crashes and outages. Fans endured long wait times and error messages when trying to buy tickets. The “Verified Fan” system meant to smooth demand also suffered technical glitches. Angry fans seeing empty queues after hours waiting blamed Ticketmaster. But the reality was their systems faced unprecedented load – far beyond forecasted capacity modeling. Painful as it was, no ticketing system could smoothly endure such astronomical demand.
SeatGeek Crash
In Swift’s first ever U.S. show with SeatGeek ticketing, their site also buckled under extreme traffic when sales opened. SeatGeek acknowledged their servers couldn’t handle the incoming volume. Their platform crashed completely for a period early in onsales for Nashville’s Nissan Stadium show. After stabilizing, SeatGeek’s queue system took hours for fans to work through. So both major ticketing platforms floundered trying to handle the soaring demand.
CAPTHCA Challenges
Both Ticketmaster and SeatGeek relied heavily on CAPTCHA challenges to manage traffic spikes: forcing users to confirm they were not bots before entering queues. Fans complained these human verification tests took minutes to complete as images failed to load. CAPTCHAs became a necessity to prevent automated bot attacks, but further slowed down access during sales. This likely increased perceptions of technical issues, and wait times for organic users to checkout.
Consequences for Fans
The challenges getting Taylor Swift tickets led to stressful experiences for fans:
Long Queues and Waiting
Once past initial technical hurdles, fans faced Queue wait times stretching 6-12 hours in some cases. The website queues gave realtime updates on how many thousands of users were ahead. Sitting staring at a stagnant queue for most of your day makes for an extremely frustrating user experience.
Uncertain Outcomes
After dedicating so much time waiting, many fans got deep in queues only to have tickets sell out. Inventory would disappear, and they’d be left empty-handed after hours in purgatory. Queues are essentially lottery systems. So fans have no guarantee of tickets after their long waits.
Rising Prices
Dynamic pricing meant ticket prices increased throughout sales in response to demand. Some fans waited hours only to reach checkout and see inflated prices – often multiple times the initial listings. On one hand, this functions as effective yield management. However, for fans on budgets it feels unfair asnowaitlists offer no price certainty.
Anxiety and Frustration
In total, the arduous processes of presales and general onsales led to immensive stress and frustration for Taylor’s followers. Technical glitches, long waits, uncertain outcomes and rising prices make an already high-stakes and competitive ticketing environment almost intolerable for fans. It’s no wonder so many were forced to resort to unfulfilled waitlisting.
Waitlist Case Study: Glendale, AZ
Glendale, Arizona provides an illustrative case study on just how intense the waitlist situation was:
* Venue = State Farm Stadium – capacity 63,400
* Total waitlist registrations = Over 2 million
* That’s over 30 times the venue’s capacity waitlisted!
* Many fans waited 6-10 hours in queues
* Prices rose from $49-$450 at start to $149-$1000 by end
* 55,000 tickets sold in presales
* Just 8,000 tickets reached general onsale
This shows how a giant waitlist fed by presales led to extremely short supply and intense competition in the general onsale. Also demonstrated is the significant price inflation throughout sales. Inevitably the miniscule 8,000 ticket allotment was rapidly devoured. Leaving approximately 1.99 million waitlisted fans empty-handed.
The State Farm Stadium onsale illustrates the themes seen across Swift’s tour: enormous demand, insufficient supply, long queues, uncertain outcomes and skyrocketing costs. These factors combine to create the unfortunate yet inevitable outcome: millions of Waitlisted Swifties.
Looking Ahead
Given the unprecedented waitlisting situation, are there any solutions or improvements that could help going forward? Here are some possibilities:
More Tour Dates
Adding shows is the most direct way to increase supply to better meet demand. While tours have high overhead costs, selling out huge stadiums virtually guarantees phenomenal returns. If feasible, Taylor could look to add more concerts in major markets like Los Angeles and New York.
Larger Venues
Booking larger capacity stadiums like 100,000+ capacity college football fields could significantly increase supply. The tradeoff would be losing intimacy and crowd energy. But maximizing seating could allow more fans to get tickets.
Ticketmaster System Upgrades
Ticketmaster will need to reevaluate its server capacity and stability to handle future high-demand onsales. Improved queue designs could also enhance user experience. Features like realtime numerical queue position updates would make waits feel less endless.
Focus On Accessibility
More emphasis could be placed on making tickets accessible to real fans over profit maximization. Examples could include capping dynamic pricing, doing larger fan club allocations, and putting strict limits on presales. Disincentivizing scalpers through strong resale rules also helps. Access-focused initiatives like Taylor’s “Verified Fan” program are a great start and could be expanded.
New Sales Models
The traditional onsale model with limited-time first-come-first-serve drops inevitably creates traumatic experiences when demand exceeds supply at extreme levels. New sales models like leftovers-based waitlists and raffles could potentially improve fan experiences. However these unproven approaches also have downsides and risks if not thoughtfully implemented.
Conclusion
Given her superstar status and massive fanbase, unprecedented waitlisting demand for Taylor Swift’s Eras tour was somewhat inevitable. However pain points like technical problems, price inflation and long uncertain queues undeniably amplified negative experiences for fans. There are no silver bullet solutions to challenges surrounding such exceptionally high demand. But Taylor’s team, in partnership with ticketing platforms, can learn from this release to makes incremental improvements. Enhancing accessibility through larger capacities, anti-scalping efforts and queue innovations would be strong starting points. That combined with Taylor’s amazing live show will hopefully lead to more Swifties getting to experience the magic in-person next time around.