Ticketmaster - you’re a mess.

By Avery Slavin Editorial Staff By Andrea Zereski Staff Writer

Ticketmaster, a commonly used website for buying tickets to concerts and sporting events, has been a stressor for many trying to attend them. It’s gotten to the point where people have adopted the phrase, “I won/lost the Ticketmaster war” when talking about whether or not they were able to acquire tickets - specifically, concert tickets. Artists allow fans to sign up to receive a presale code to get early access to tickets for a tour, but typically have no limits on the number of signups. During the presale timeslot, you are placed in a queue on the Ticketmaster website. Since there are no regulations on how many people can receive the code, you could be placed in a queue with 10,000 people ahead of you - maybe more. It can take as long as an hour to get through the queue and onto the ticket selection screen, and there is no guarantee tickets will be left for you. Panic sets in when your place in the queue starts to rapidly get closer to zero, as that usually means there are no more tickets to buy and people are leaving the website, likely frustrated. This is what it means to “lose the Ticketmaster war.” A few days later, general sale tickets become available on Ticketmaster’s site, but many times, it’s people trying to resell the tickets they bought during the presale with an upcharge. After clicking on a concert you might want tickets for in the app, an acknowledgment screen pops up and states, “Resell ticket prices may exceed face value.” After experimenting with this, we saw that this is certainly true. This December, indie-rock band Lord Huron is holding a concert at a venue with a 5,000-person capacity in Boston. There are a few more tickets available, and the cheapest seat - labeled with “verified resale ticket” - was $190. During their last tour in the summer of 2025, the face-value tickets were between $75-$110. Assuming this tour is similar, that extra fee for a resale ticket is a bit excessive, but necessary in order to attend the show if someone really wants to. For this reason, usually when people don’t get tickets during the presale, they don’t get them at all. To make matters more frustrating, according to what we’ve seen online, the queue for presales is randomized, meaning if you join early, you could still get booted to the back of the queue where now hundreds, maybe thousands, are in front of you. The website is just overall unreliable. It crashes and glitches at the worst possible times, sometimes right before you get tickets to an event you really want to attend. Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour had record numbers of people waiting in the queues. Then it crashed. Thousands of people, including one of our moms, were in the queue when it happened. Two tickets in the lower bowl were secured, but seconds before the payment was processed, the screen filled with statements saying we were bots. The tickets were gone. Any hope of attending the tour I’d been anticipating for years was gone. A few weeks later, Ticketmaster followed up with the deal of a lifetime: two tickets at face value. We were part of the few lucky ones who received this offer. For presales, big artists usually only go through Ticketmaster, so when we click a link to try to get tickets, we have no other choice than to use that disastrous site. The only time we like Ticketmaster is when we get lucky. This week, one of us was able to get tickets to see Calvin Harris, a globally known EDM artist with over 56 billion streams worldwide. He announced his first-ever North American tour a few weeks ago, with fans new and old excited to get the chance to see him. I didn’t think I’d get the tickets. My friend, also in the queue, had thousands upon thousands of people ahead of her. I ended up only having about 3,000 people in front of me, and was able to score reasonably priced tickets. I had finally won the Ticketmaster war. Our Verdict: Ticketmaster… figure it out. We need a better system in place for presales and general sales.