“Taylor Swift just announced that she’s going on tour! Get tickets now! Now, before they are all gone!” an average Taylor Swift fan probably said on Nov. 1, when Swift announced her world tour. Lately, the rush to get concert tickets for artists all around the globe has been significant. People have been waiting online to get tickets for their favorite artists hours before the time of sale even starts. 

Many people have been struggling to get tickets. Complications of all kinds arise such as high prices, glitching servers and simply no tickets being available. 

“It’s a bit of an inconvenience that concert tickets are so much money,” senior Megan Jones said. 

According to Variety, Ticketmaster holds back as many as 90% of a concert’s tickets for the secondary market: credit card companies, promoters, radio stations, or artists’ fan clubs. Other tickets are bought in bulk by resellers, who use bots to resell them at a higher price. So, everyone who wants to go to a concert has to fight to be included in the leftover 10%. 

The social media platform Tik Tok has brought lots of attention to certain artists. Fans post updates about them and a lot of the time, post about tour dates. This causes a lot of people to want concert tickets even more and to jump on the bandwagon. “Hype” circulates around singers, and the line waiting to see them live multiplies. 

Swift announced that her tour tickets would be on sale on Nov. 18, and she also included a presale link on her Instagram story. Fans quickly swarmed the link to be considered a “verified fan” and to have a better chance of getting tickets. However, lots of people were experiencing server crashes.

“I was trying to use the link about 30 minutes after she first announced the tour. I was pretty early, and already, the website was crashing. I was having a hard time trying to even log in,” senior Brandi Bonzo said. 

Harry Styles is another artist who has become very popular, and consequently, his tickets have become harder to buy. On May 20, he had a one-night-only show in New York. Alumni Alexis Surrenda and Bailey Stewart managed to get tickets. 

“With the One Night Only being a special event, the only people able to buy tickets were those who got codes. Out of all the people who registered to be picked for presale codes, I managed to be one of them. So the following day after receiving my code, I had to get in a queue for ticket sales. This was the most stressful process. There can be so many people ahead of you in queues, and you must have every piece of information you may need on hand,” Surrenda said. 

After being lucky enough to be chosen for ticket presales, Surrenda had to be ready to buy the tickets as fast as possible.

 “Once I got in to pick the seats, all of them disappeared so fast. It was stressful trying to find two seats together (for me and my friend I was taking) with all of them being taken so fast. Eventually, I zoomed in on seats, picked two and hit enter to buy them. Overall, the hardest part wasn’t necessarily being picked for a code, but trying to get seats together without them being taken right from under you by another person,” Surrenda said.

Even though getting tickets has become stressful for some, people still feel that going to concerts is worth the hassle.

“I was a little shaky from anxiety, but overall the concert was totally worth it,” Surrenda said.