The Culture of Resellers: Sporting Events and the Era’s Tour

Game 6, 2003. The Minnesota Wild versus the Colorado Avalanche. Avalanche up 3-2. Minnesota has home advantage. Tickets to the game sold out the instant the Wild won on the road. In an act of desperation, many die-hard fans dropped everything to go to this Monday night game. They hoped to find their golden ticket on the street, the shouts of those selling the excess tickets they bought. It didn’t matter the cost. It didn’t matter where it was. The game needed to be attended. Nowadays, the culture of going to an event like that without a ticket is far-fetched. The risk is simply too high for both parties involved in the transaction. Sure, the days of purchasing tickets on the street are bygone, yet the ticket resale market was valued at 2.85 billion dollars in 2023. In fact, those street vendors turning tickets into a profit catalyzed a culture that was only perpetuated by an increasingly online world. 

The COVID-19 pandemic caused a global shutdown. Events like the 2020 My Chemical Romance Tour were suspended, while others, like the NCAA’s 2020 March Madness, were canceled outright. A surge of canceled events even caused Ticketmaster to make an official policy on refunds in their help center. Many ticketholders of these events opted for another avenue, reselling their tickets with an astronomical demand increase. The demand increase, along with the cabin fever many Americans were facing at the end of the pandemic, bottlenecked into an unprecedented resale market. Many of these resellers even bring home a staggering $40,000 of profit per show. The problem persisted through the ease of access companies like SeatGeek provided in the buying and selling of event tickets.

The ticket reseller platform SeatGeek rose to dominance in the late 2010s; they capitalized on the growing market, even becoming the primary ticketing partner for New Orleans in 2017. While an exponential win for the shareholders at SeatGeek, it raised concern for fans of the game. Tickets to these events became increasingly more difficult to tell whether they came from the box office directly or from a reseller directly using SeatGeek. On top of that, many individuals were falling for malicious scam tactics. Scammers would attempt to use peer-to-peer websites like Facebook Marketplace to try to have eager concertgoers fork over thousands in cash. Many of these scams can be traced back to Taylor Swift’s Era’s Tour. 

Many of the lessons learned by the Era’s Tour have coaxed state government action. Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota signed into law the “Taylor Swift Bill,” which required all ticketing platforms to display all hidden fees upfront and increase the difficulty of attempting to sell more than one copy of the same ticket. The ladder was a pertinent problem for many would-be concertgoers in the Era’s Tour. Although there is no regulation at the federal level, states such as Maryland joined Minnesota soon after to try to combat the growing issue that is the resale of event tickets.