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Controversy surrounds ticket sale fiasco for Taylor Swift in Chicago

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Published  November 17, 2022 9:37pm CST
Entertainment
FOX 32 Chicago

Controversy surrounds Taylor Swift ticket sale fiasco in Chicago

There’s bad blood as ticket sales for Taylor Swift’s "The Eras Tour" run into more turmoil.

CHICAGO - There’s bad blood as ticket sales for Taylor Swift’s "The Eras Tour" run into more turmoil.

Ticketmaster is canceling Friday sales for public tickets, citing unprecedented demand. But fans aren’t buying it. Third-party ticket vendors, like StubHub, show oodles of open seats, with prices five-times that of face value.

"I looked on StubHub just wondering to see and the cheapest ticket I could find was in the nosebleeds, last row, behind the stage, and that was going for $504 dollars," said disappointed Milwaukee fan Betsy Katschke.

She attended Swift’s last tour at Soldier Field in 2018 and said the ticket purchasing process was smooth back then. Not this time, however.

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"I registered for the verified fan pre-sale the minute the link went live. I didn't get a code to be part of that pre-sale. I have a Capitol One card…that didn't work out. I was in the cue for almost two hours. It was sold out by that point," Katschke said.

A Ticketmaster plan to ensure that verified fans got tickets, instead of bots used by third-party vendors, failed. The company’s CEO said 14 million people attempted to buy pre-sale tickets Tuesday. The demand kicked fans in and out of virtual waiting rooms and crashed the website at times.

Now, federal lawmakers are questioning Ticketmaster’s monopoly on ticket sales for live events. Tennessee’s attorney general has even launched an investigation into the high number of consumer complaints it received.