The pain and euphoria of scoring Taylor Swift face value tickets at the last minute

(CNN) When Julia Thomas woke up at her home in Cleveland last Saturday, she automatically decided to drive 15 hours to Taylor Swift’s concert that night in Nashville, picking up her sister in Cincinnati along the way. But they are missing one thing: tickets.

Like many Swift fans, she is It couldn’t get tickets on Ticketmaster when it went on sale last fall, and it can’t afford the four-figure ticket Their price is listed on resale sites. About halfway through, her sister found $350 worth of floor seats after refreshing various Swift-focused Twitter accounts: Ticketmaster just dropped a few last-minute tickets at face value on their website.

“We got very lucky,” she told CNN. “We got to Nashville with about an hour to spare before the concert started.”

Thomas is one of his many loyal fans Keep a close eye on a mix of Twitter accounts dedicated to alerting fans when Ticketmaster releases a new batch of Swift Tickets after the initial sale.

Ticket drops are nothing new. This is ostensibly due to extra seats being added to a venue, or if tickets are being returned. But the drops have become an obsession among Swift’s most devoted fans, who struggle to find tickets for the artist in the face of Ticketmaster’s broader ticket game.

Ticketmaster is under scrutiny for flopping online sales on the mega star’s latest outingAnd In an era when the live events industry is already completely dominated, leaving few, if any, alternatives. In November, a pre-sale code was sent to “Verified Fans” — but when sales started, severe demand on the website bogged down and millions of Swifties couldn’t get a ticket. Pre-sale tickets for Capital One cardholders brought similar frustration – Ticketmaster then canceled sales to the public, citing “unusually high demand” and “insufficient remaining ticket stock”.

In congressional testimony, the president and chief financial officer of Ticketmaster Live Nation’s parent company President and Chief Financial Officer Joe Berchtold in part Blame Ticket incident on bots. he is too He asserted that Ticketmaster does not set ticket prices, does not specify the number of tickets on sale and that “in most cases, venues set service fees and ticket fees”, not Ticketmaster.

Ticketmaster and Live Nation are currently face a lawsuit Swift fans were sacked across the country for “illegal conduct,” with plaintiffs alleging that the ticket giant had broken antitrust laws, among other things. A preliminary hearing took place in March; Ticketmaster denied the allegations.

Millions of fans are still unable to purchase tickets. However, in recent weeks, Ticketmaster has been sending out more Verified Fan Tokens to people who were originally selected from the pre-sale to purchase from the remaining tickets. For people without codes, Ticketmaster also does routine ticket sales before shows.

However, it is not unusual for thousands of fans to attempt to secure the same tickets at the same time. Sometimes, seats are bought by bots and scalpers, and reposted to third-party sites like StubHub in a matter of minutes.

Ticketmaster did not respond to a request for comment on ticket discounts.

But that doesn’t deter Swift fans. Some spend hours searching for tickets online and driving long distances to concert venues without a ticket in hand, even at the risk of ending up heartbroken.

How to find ticket discounts

Molly Ramsey, an 18-year-old cheerleader from Bristol, Tennessee, said she recently found the Twitter account @erastourticks, who often tweet about Ticketmaster drops. “my family [last weekend] I took a gamble driving 5 hours to Nashville to see if we could get tickets at face value.”

Nearly nine hours after the Ticketmaster update, I got four tickets right before the show started. “We were sitting outside the stadium while the opener was being played, but once the payment was made it was an out of body experience,” she said. My sister started screaming and dancing.

In a nod to Swift’s hit song “Anti-Hero” and the scramble to find landing tickets, the Twitter account — which has about 22,000 followers — recently chirp: “It must always be exhausting to root against the champ aka Ticketmaster.”

A similar site, @concertleaks, linked its 62,000 followers to tickets to Swift at the last minute. The account was originally created years ago to post playlists, merchandise, and tickets for various artists, but has evolved to help connect followers with ticket drops as well.

last A Twitter account called @ErasTourResell, which has 120,000 followers, has gained significant traction by working with distributors who are willing to sell their tickets at face value. The account is run by longtime friends Courtney Johnston, Shanet Garay, and Angel Richards. The twenty-something trio aims to make Swift tickets as affordable as possible for fans without overpaying or scamming them.

“We’ve posted between 2,700 and 3,000 tickets so far, all at face value,” the trio said in a DM on Twitter. “It’s really rewarding to see these tickets go to true fans at face value when the resale market has insane prices where people are making triple the profits. It’s also amazing to meet people who follow the account at shows, especially if it’s the only reason we’ve been able to.” Even out of attendance was by our account.”

They spend hours, between work and school, sifting through daily orders to make sure tickets are real. The group encourages buyers to ask for video proof of ticket purchase, pay only via Paypal Goods and Services due to its protection plan and never pay for face value. (They also said they don’t make any money from the process, and only do it to help fellow Swifties, but they do have a Ko-Fi account where people can donate money for food or coffee.)

“Surprisingly, the vetting process has gone very well and smoothly because we now know what a recording looks like on screen or what a fake or hacked email could look like,” the group said. “It’s all about being able to capture the very small details — what color the image is supposed to look like, what link is clickable, where that link should take you, and what message is supposed to appear at any given point.”

But getting these tickets is not easy. After posting a ticket alert on their Twitter page, several users say they have received no response from sellers, and it is unclear how they choose a buyer among the hundreds of fans they have reached out to.

“It’s definitely gotten more difficult as we have more followers,” the friends behind @ErasTourResell told CNN. “some [sellers pick] Based on and pointing to a direct first message, others choose someone with a touching story so it really varies. It helps to get our notifications because we tend to do a bit of warning and teasing before most tickets are posted.”

Away from Twitter, many fans are taking to sites like Reddit, including R/Taylor Swift’s page, to get play-by-play details on Ticketmaster Drops. Some say they spotted her several times throughout the day but most often 30 minutes before the show started. (Tickets showed up even an hour after the show.) Others suggest using Apple Pay to speed up the checkout process and avoid losing tickets while typing in credit card information.

A lesson in patience

Despite these tremendous efforts, not all are fans Find luck online.

Katie Blackman, 33, of Birmingham, Alabama, said she spent all day at a Nashville hotel last weekend renovating the site. She only once managed to get one ticket into her online shopping cart, but it was gone before she could check out.

However, I drove to Nissan Stadium that night and parked in the parking lot along with hundreds of other fans without even trying to get in. And when the lights dimmed minutes before Swift took to the stage, the crowd dispersed; She was almost the only one left, still reviving Ticketmaster.

“All my searching and combing of Ticketmaster and resale sites has been worthless,” she said. “But then all of a sudden, a random girl came up to me really running up to me seconds before she came over and said, ‘Hey, do you want to come with me?'” “

The stranger had just scored last minute tickets and had extra money to sell. “A miracle happened,” Blackman said. “My new boyfriend and I sang every song. We cried and we danced and we hugged. It was absolutely worth hell to get there.”