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Taylor Swift fans seeing red over Eras Tour ticket prices

Jack Troy
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AP
Taylor Swift performs during the opener of her Eras Tour on March 17 at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Ariz.

Forget a blank space.

You darn near need a blank check to work your way into either of this week’s Taylor Swift concerts at Acrisure Stadium.

Ticket prices are soaring days before the most-anticipated concert stop of the year.

Swift’s Eras Tour hits the stadium Friday and Saturday.

On Wednesday, online resale platform StubHub listed the cheapest available tickets for either date at about $1,100. Most lower-bowl seats hovered between $2,000 and $6,000. One floor ticket in the front row of section F14 — the second section from the main stage — had an asking price of $21,000.

“Cruel Summer,” indeed.

“You really aren’t seeing the tickets dropping to the level that really should be reasonable,” said self-­described super fan Hilary Judis, who said she analyzes ticket sales for Studio Theatre in Washington, D.C., and has kept an eye on price trends for seats to Swift’s shows.

Judis is attending Saturday’s show.

“There’s a lot of risk to showing up (without a ticket),” she said.

Scoring tickets to any of Swift’s stops has been challenging from the start.

Tickets for the Eras Tour received such high demand when pre-sales began in November that Ticketmaster canceled sales, leading to a national fiasco.

Ticketmaster then canceled its planned public sale of tickets, citing “extraordinarily high demands on ticketing systems and insufficient remaining ticket inventory to meet that demand.”

Politicians across the country, including then-Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro, started taking complaints related to the canceled sales. In a two-day span in November, Shapiro’s office received more than 1,200 complaints.

Swift later took to Instagram to apologize to fans and chastise Ticketmaster.

“I’m not going to make excuses for anyone because we asked them, multiple times, if they could handle this kind of demand, and we were assured they could,” Swift said. “It’s truly amazing that 2.4 million people got tickets, but it really (ticks) me off that a lot of them feel like they went through several bear attacks to get them.”

The confusion has prompted fans to fend for themselves. Many have taken to social media.

Created two years ago, a Taylor Swift Resell Group on Facebook boasts more than 37,000 members and was growing by the hundreds over the past week.

Dozens of fans shared their struggles trying to score seats under a TribLIVE Facebook post, including Jennifer Williams of Old Forge, Lackawanna County.

Williams, 41, has tried to take her 13-year-old daughter to see Swift in Philadelphia, Foxborough, Mass., and now Pittsburgh, but she said it’s been a “nightmare” finding seats for $300 or less.

At one point, Williams turned to social media and nearly fell victim to a scam.

“As soon as you put that you’re searching for tickets, the scammers come out of the woodwork,” Williams said.

So far, Pennsylvania Attorney General Michelle Henry’s office said it has received one potential complaint related to the Pittsburgh show.

“Our general advice is that consumers should be very careful where they purchase tickets,” a statement from the office read. “Check the websites for guarantees and refunds polices, and be sure to pay with a credit card so a fraudulent transaction can be disputed.”


Related:

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Ticketmaster urges buyers to be wary of individual sellers, especially ones offering printed tickets, accepting gift cards as payment or asking for money transfers that aren’t marked as a purchase.

With the chaos in the resale market, some would-be concertgoers are sticking to official sources as they hunt for tickets.

Still holding out hope, Jocelyn Fortson of Greencastle, Franklin County, said she will be refreshing Ticketmaster “all day” to try to land last-minute tickets at a fair price. Even if Fortson and her sister-in-law can’t make it inside the stadium, she said, they will be making the journey to Pittsburgh to “Tay-Gate” and trade friendship bracelets with fellow Swifties.

“Either way,” Fortson said, “we will be happy to be as close as we can get to her majesty herself.”

Jack Troy is a TribLive reporter covering business and health care. A Pittsburgh native, he joined the Trib in January 2024 after graduating from the University of Pittsburgh. He can be reached at jtroy@triblive.com.

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