Taylor Swift’s Erasure Tour Fans Were Its Biggest Ticket Scalpers – Billboard

According to data reviewed by , a small percentage of Taylor Swift fans made huge profits by reselling their Erasure Tour tickets on sites like StubHub as professional scalpers mostly had to watch from the sidelines. Board,

The unusual dynamic highlights the challenges major tours face in dealing with scalpers and the unintended consequences of efforts to keep tickets off the secondary market.

According to Ticketmaster officials, Swift’s touring team sought to keep Eras Tour tickets off the secondary market and met with Ticketmaster executives to discuss how to prevent widespread ticket theft. One option was that Ticketmaster could use its SafeTicks service to digitally lock tickets and prevent fans from transferring their tickets, effectively preventing all ticket buyers from reselling their tickets on sites like StubHub. Could have been stopped properly. But the downside was that, while many fans liked the idea of ​​blocking scalpers, they did not like making their own tickets non-transferable and found such restrictions inconvenient.

Ultimately, the tour decided to use Ticketmaster’s Verified Fan platform to exclude scalpers from early ticket sales, and asked buyers to register in advance. Fans identified as legitimate fans were sent a code allowing them to purchase tickets during the presale, which opened on November 15, 2022 and subsequently crashed due to millions of fans, scalpers, and bots flooding the site. Done.

Ticketmaster officials later said that the website outage was the result of a massive denial-of-service attack, which disrupted presales but did not fail security measures put in place to ward off scalpers from fans. As evidence of its success, Ticketmaster announced that less than 5% of the approximately 5 million tickets sold for the tour were listed on secondary markets.

This is an impressive feat compared to other major tours in 2023, which took fewer steps to keep tickets off the secondary market and on average 20-30% of available tickets were sold through StubHub.

While secondary tickets for tours such as Beyoncé and Coldplay were initially listed at several times the face value, as more tickets entered the secondary market over time prices declined.

Swift’s Erasure Tour had the opposite effect. Eraz tickets were marked up at 10 times the face value on StubHub, and were never released again. According to a StubHub representative, the steep price increases allowed resale sites, which collect a percentage of sales from both sellers and buyers, to generate revenue if they sold a higher quantity of tickets.

Selling tickets was easy, but getting them to fans proved difficult. StubHub noticed that orders for Erause tickets were being delayed in an unusually large amount and received complaints from buyers. When company officials investigated the issue, they discovered that 83% of the Iraz Tour tickets sold on their site were coming from new accounts with no record of previous sales. It is believed that the bulk of those tickets came from Swift fans, and they were making big bucks. A ticket with a face value of less than $150 could cost as much as $1,700, while tickets closer to the stage were priced at up to $10,000.

While the outcome of the story is surprising, the fact that 83% of the available inventory of Eras Tour tickets on StubHub was sold by fans, not ticket brokers, is a testament to how efficiently Swift and Ticketmaster are screening out professional scalpers. were doing, due to which their reach was reduced. Inventorying less than 1% of available tickets. While Swift would probably prefer that none of her tickets be sold on the secondary market, she can at least take solace in knowing that her fans, not professional scalpers, have reaped most of the financial rewards.