Select Taylor Swift fans get a second chance to buy tickets

A long-haired woman in a halter dress looks to the side as she accepts a triangle-shaped trophy

Dec. 13, 2022 10:45 AM PT

It’s true! Some Taylor Swift fans are getting a second chance to buy tickets for the singer’s upcoming Eras Tour.

Those select folks received an email Monday from Ticketmaster saying, “You have been identified as a fan who received a boost during the Verified Fan presale but did not purchase tickets. We apologize for the difficulties you may have experienced, and have been asked by Taylor’s team to create this additional opportunity for you to purchase tickets.”

Thousands of Swifties wasted hours last month waiting in an electronic queue to buy tickets, only to come away empty-handed.

An FAQ on the Ticketmaster website explains that fans who got the email will have an opportunity to buy a maximum of two tickets to a Swift show. Ticket requests, facilitated by individual email invitations that will be sent out soon, are due by Dec. 23.

The Verified Fan program requires advance registration and offers invite codes, lottery-style, to randomly selected interested individuals. Not everyone who registers as a fan gets an invite code, as people experienced last week during ticket sales for country singer Morgan Wallen’s One Night at a Time World Tour. And not everyone with an invite code is guaranteed a ticket.

Even with the second-chance invites promised to Swifties, potential buyers are still not guaranteed to receive tickets, the Ticketmaster site says. But it sounds like the process is designed to roll out on a more controlled timeline than the original crush did.

Ticketmaster previously cited “unprecedented” demand that overwhelmed its system and caused the Eras Tour to sell out prematurely. Bots and “fans who didn’t have invite codes” were blamed.

The company ended up canceling its promised sale to the general public “due to extraordinarily high demands on ticketing systems and insufficient remaining ticket inventory to meet that demand.”

The update comes less than two weeks after 26 fans from 13 states filed a lawsuit against Ticketmaster’s parent company, Live Nation Entertainment Inc., alleging it engaged in fraud, price-fixing and antitrust-law violations during last month’s Verified Fan presale.

Also, late last month, members of Congress asked the Federal Trade Commission whether it was going to enforce a 2016 law that gives the government the authority to crack down on those who misuse bots to buy large amounts of tickets for profit.

These brokers often run ticket bots — software applications that are programmed to run automated tasks online — to quickly and automatically suck up swaths of tickets. Those tickets are then resold at higher prices on third-party websites.

“It’s truly amazing that 2.4 million people got tickets, but it really pisses me off that a lot of them feel like they went through several bear attacks to get them,” Swift said in a message to fans several days after the on-sale fiasco. She said she refused to “make excuses” for a company that according to her had repeatedly assured her team it could handle the demand her tour would create.

Meanwhile, in Mexico, a consumer-protection official said Ticketmaster México would be fined millions after hundreds of faulty tickets were sold for Bad Bunny shows last Friday and Saturday in Mexico City. The confusion over duplicate tickets — 1,600 on Friday and 110 on Saturday — caused the concerts to be delayed, Billboard reported Monday. Some people with legitimate tickets wound up being denied entry.

Ticketmaster México blamed the problem on “the presentation of an unprecedented number of counterfeit tickets,” Billboard said, but the government official said all the tickets were issued by the ticket-sales company.

Times staff writers Christi Carras and Jonah Valdez contributed to this report.