After two failed attempts at presales that resulted in sweet, innocent Swifties waiting for hours for either nothing or, if they were lucky, the luxury of paying $75,000 for a parking pass to one of the Eras Tour stops, Ticketmaster canceled the November 18 general sale. #TicketmasterIsOverParty is trending and AOC is tweeting about breaking up the Ticketmaster–Live Nation monopoly. And, look, I hate Ticketmaster as much as the next 400-year-old Pearl Jam fan, but none of this addresses the real problem: Too many people want to see Taylor Swift live in concert. Robin Williams has a joke that “cocaine is God’s way of telling you you are making too much money.†“Snow on the Beach†aside, I don’t think Taylor Swift rips rails, but what has happened this week with Ticketmaster is God’s way of telling Taylor Swift she is just too popular for this planet.
I am not blaming Taylor Swift! I am congratulating her. Over the course of 16 years, she has made music that somehow achieved both tremendous commercial acclaim and near-universal critical acclaim. Savvily, she pivoted from country to pop without losing her initial fan base. During the pandemic, she made two albums with a member of the National, which added boring old snobs like me to her massive coalition. The Eras Tour was meant to be a celebration of her sustained relevance and continued artistic growth, but frankly she did too good of a job.
“Even when a high demand on sale goes flawlessly from a tech perspective, many fans are left empty-handed,†Ticketmaster said in its explainer on what happened. “For example: based on the volume of traffic to our site, Taylor would need to perform over 900 stadium shows (almost 20x the number of shows she is doing) … that’s a stadium show every single night for the next 2.5 years.†Our nation’s fine football stadiums are just too small. That means she is more popular than football — more popular than college football! It’s like the titular Jaws from the movie Jaws, but instead of needing a bigger boat, we’re going to need a bigger stadium. The only reasonable option is to colonize a planet and have everyone come to her, in a sort of intergalactic-residency situation.
Short of that, she needs to shed some fans. Like 7 or 10 million, give or take. If you are feeling yourself getting mad at this proposition, don’t worry, this won’t include you. You clearly care about her a lot and that is good and nice and special. I want you to see her in concert with your fellow Swifties. But, say, if you didn’t take her seriously until Red, you’re out! (Excluding those too young to hear her music before then, of course.) If you think Jack Antonoff is her best collaborator, no tour for you. If you tweeted something shady during her Reputation era, I think everyone agrees you don’t deserve to see her live. If you can’t match the ex to the song, you can still listen to her music, don’t worry, but you cannot, under any circumstances, stan. Maybe you can be a fan, but probably, just to be safe, people like you — and me, for that matter — should downgrade Swift to “Sure, I like some of her stuff. What has she been up to lately?†Until there are laws about this stuff, we must make sacrifices for the greater good. It’s thee, hi, you’re the problem, it’s thee.