On October 21st, Taylor Swift released her tenth studio album: Midnights. Great commercial success coupled with Swift’s immense popularity led to a complete breakdown of Ticketmaster.

The album consists of 14 tracks plus an extended version, the “3am edition”, that adds 6 tracks for a grand total of 20 songs.  The album is a unique experience, and just about the biggest emotional rollercoaster one could imagine. An unsuspecting listener can go from feeling as if they’re dancing on top of the whole world to crying in the fetal position on their floor in a matter of seconds. 

It’s this musical diversity, however, that makes Taylor Swift, and specifically this album, so incredible. No matter what you’re going through in life, Midnights will provide a song you can find a connection with. Ranking of the songs but it’s for this very reason that doing so feels so impossible. Depending on how one may be feeling, rankings of the songs flip flop around with the ferocity of a fish left out on a hot sidewalk. 

If this album is a storm of emotions, one can only imagine the absolute tsunami that her upcoming The Eras Tour will be. In 2023, Swift will embark on her first tour since her Reputation tour back in 2018. What makes this upcoming tour most special though, is it will not simply focus on one of her albums as have all her previous tours, but quite literally all of them. Featuring songs from all 10 of her albums appeals to a wide range of fans, so it’s not surprising that demand for tickets was quite literally unprecedented. 

Ticketmaster was simply unable to handle the immense demand for The Eras Tour tickets. Thousands of tickets not sold to fans were purchased by bots run by scalpers. These bots purchase tickets and resell them for outrageous prices, and the resold tickets are now going for prices reaching the $20,000 mark.  Ticketmaster created a greedy, monopolized system that prioritizes money over both the artist and the fans which only exacerbated the fiasco. Because of both the immense demand and Ticketmaster’s failure to handle the situation, only a fraction of fans were actually able to get tickets. 

Finding someone who survived the great war of ticket buying with a set is hard to find. Gabby Smitherman, one of the few who secured tickets, credits the success to her parents “Both of my parents had taken the day off work to try and get in the waiting room.” However, even with that much planning and dedication tickets were not guaranteed. Like most, Smitherman still failed to secure tickets to the Seattle show. However in the end she was able to get some for the Vegas show. 

Throughout all this, Taylor Swift has once again proven that she is the current queen of pop and won’t be going anywhere soon. The album is nothing short of a triumph, and as for those responsible for the disaster at Ticketmaster, it is a relaxing thought that Karma will take its sweet revenge upon them.