Taylor Swift Eras Tour tickets are fetching more than $20,000
Diehard Taylor Swift fans are paying through the nose to secure tickets to her "Eras Tour" concerts through resellers after Ticketmaster's site crashed during a presale period. The live concert and ticketing company subsequently canceled a general public sales period that was meant to begin Friday, generating bad blood between the concert behemoth and Swifties, as the pop artist's fans are known.
On Friday, ticket exchange and resale company Vivid Seats was selling prime tickets for as much as $8,253. Ticket reseller Stubhub listed tickets to Taylor Swift "Eras Tour" events for as much as $6,300 per ticket to some shows, for seats close to the stage. One Twitter user spotted tickets being resold for a whopping $22,500 each via StubHub.
Indeed, ticket prices on the secondary market rose 13% after Ticketmaster announced the cancellation of sales to the general public, according to TicketIQ, another ticket resale and exchange platform.
Tickets are pricier than previous tours
Eras Tour tickets are being resold for more than 10 times the cost of tickets to concerts that were part of Swift's earlier tours, according to TicketIQ's tracker. The average price of a ticket for sale on the secondary market is $2,424.
That's a function of high demand and low supply. Fewer tickets have been released on the secondary market compared to earlier tours. This suggests that Ticketmaster did a decent job getting tickets into the hands of true fans as opposed to scalpers.
"Everyone has been bashing Ticketmaster, but the flip side of that is that this 'Verified Fan' product really kept brokers out, and there are very few tickets being resold compared to her past tours," said TicketIQ founder and president Jesse Lawrence.
The average list price for a ticket to shows on her last tour in 2018 was $157, according to the TicketIQ. In 2015, tickets to "The 1989 World Tour" concerts were resold for an average of $245.
On average in the resale market, there are fewer than 1,000 tickets available to each Eras Tour concert, compared to the up to 9,000 tickets that were resold to each of the shows on the singer's earlier tours, according to TicketIQ.
At an average of $3,622 a piece, the priciest tickets being sold are for Swift's concert at MetLife stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey.
"Demand is off the charts, and Ticketmaster was actually able to get more tickets into the hands of fans. For everyone complaining they didn't get tickets, someone did get tickets," Lawrence said. "There's just not a lot of resale. Everyone who bought tickets is actually using them — they didn't buy them to resell them."
"I had sticker shock at first"
Minah Oh, a single mom and film festival programmer from Massachusetts, said she visited Ticketmaster's website the day tickets went on sale but immediately encountered problems. She ended up at StubHub, where tickets to a May 20 concert at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts, were selling for upwards of $900.
"I had sticker shock at first, but I knew I would never be able to get them through Ticketmaster," she told CBS News.
She was eyeing three tickets for herself and her two children that she plans to give them for Christmas. She ended up spending just over $1,000 per ticket.
"I knew prices would be crazy expensive but when I logged onto StubHub, they blew my mind," she said. "But this is iconic, and I want my kids to have that experience."
