Tickets for Taylor Swift recently announced The Toronto shows on his Eras tour go on sale Wednesday.
Swift will play six shows at the Rogers Center next November, the only shows in Canada in 2024. The first two dates, November 14 and 15, go on sale at 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. ET, while the others dates will follow in pairs. Thursday and Friday.
Anyone wanting tickets would already have to pre-register by August 5 through Ticketmaster’s verified fan program, a process designed to manage demand, filter bots, and avoid high-priced tickets.
Callista Ryan from Vancouver was one of the lucky fans to survive that process.
“I was leaving the gym and I opened my phone and I saw a text coming to me saying that I had received the code to get a ticket,” he said. “I was very excited. I almost screamed in the locker room.”
Many fans placed on the waiting list
Even after getting the code, Ryan still had to navigate the online ticket purchase process.
“It was actually quite stressful on the Ticketmaster site, because you click on a ticket, you go to buy, and then boom, someone already has those tickets,” he said.
Ryan was ultimately able to secure four tickets and estimates that he spent around $2,000 in total. She plans to take her mother to the show and take a family trip outside of the event.
“I was 10 years old when the Brave the album came out. And now I am 25 years old. And so, from my childhood to my young adult years, Taylor Swift has been there,” she said.
Not everyone who applied had the same experience, as many fans across the country were placed on a waiting list.
“I know about 30 people who got on the waiting list,” fan Tuba Chishti told Breaking: Network on Wednesday. Chishti herself was placed on the waiting list.
Others have also signed up for RBC’s Avion Rewards program, which allows fans access to a pool of Swift tickets, even if they aren’t customers of the bank. These tickets will be available on August 15 and fans will be limited to four per sale.
Two huge fans of Taylor Swift explain what they’re going to do after they can’t get a code to buy tickets to the pop superstar’s shows in Toronto.
Chisthi hopes to get tickets through the waitlist or through Avion Rewards, but says if all else fails, she has a back-up plan.
“I know it’s November and it can be a little cold, but not that cold by Canadian standards. So I hope that [the Rogers Centre] it’s open and we can at least do the parking lot experience,” he said.
‘Once in a Lifetime Experience’
Montreal fan Samara O’Gorman was also placed on the waiting list. She told the News Network that she understands the costs will likely be high, particularly for people traveling to Toronto for the show.
“We’re not paying for a concert right now. I think it’s very much an experience and a once-in-a-lifetime experience,” he said.
Pascal Courty, an economics professor at the University of Victoria, says he is not surprised by the lawsuit.
“[Swift] I would have to give so many concerts to make everyone happy. And there are a limited number of dates that you can perform,” he said.
“Courty says artists like Swift could charge more for tickets and still sell them, but they want to give more fans a chance to see their shows.
“There is going to be money left on the table,” he said. “And it means that not everyone will be able to get a ticket.”
Challenge of preventing ticket scalping
The challenge, Courty says, is making sure fans are the ones getting those tickets without scalpers picking them up to resell at inflated prices.
“Some people will try to sneak in and don’t want to go to the concert, but they realize they can buy low and sell high,” he said. “That’s another reason why there would be massive demand and it would be difficult to manage.”
Courty says she thinks the verified fan process will likely help prevent some of those people from “just getting paid.” But he also pointed out that other methods could completely remove the scalp.
Courty says one way to discourage it is to make tickets by name, like airline tickets, where people must declare a name at the time of purchase.
The CBC’s Talia Kliot, a Taylor Swift fan, headed to the Avalon Mall in St. John’s to see how people are preparing for Swift’s return to Canada in November 2024.
“In case something happens to you, you can no longer show up at the last minute, you return the ticket,” he said, noting that in that scenario, someone new would be pulled from a virtual line, and people would be able to access the venue only if they had a ticket and corresponding identification.
“That system would completely prevent reselling for profit because there is no way for this third party to slip through,” Courty said, since they could only transfer tickets to the main seller.
Breaking: contacted Ticketmaster about the rules around ticket reselling for Swift’s Toronto shows.
Several scalping tickets for Swift’s Wednesday show in Inglewood, California, have been listed on StubHub with prices starting at around $1,150.
