Taylor Swift fans are furious over the jacked-up prices she’s charging for concert tickets.
Ticked-off fans are balking at buying seats for the 28-year-old pop star’s tour to promote her new “Reputation” album, blasting ticket prices and greedy sales gimmicks.
One Twitter user wrote: “I paid $150 for my ticket with amazing seats for the 1989 tour. Now for the same seats I have to pay about $500."
A look at Ticketmaster’s interactive seat charts confirms that Swift’s schedule of 33 dates for the North American “Reputation” tour has yet to produce a single sellout, from its May 8 launch in Phoenix to its Oct. 6 finale in Arlington, Texas.
That’s despite seats being available to the general public since Swift’s birthday on Dec. 13. By comparison, all the dates on Swift’s “1989” tour in 2015 “sold out within minutes,” according to concertsandsports.com.
According to one music-industry insider, “Sales so far have been a mega disappointment. There are hundreds if not thousands of tickets left for every show.”
On top of high prices, some prospective buyers are getting irked by Ticketmaster’s “Verified Fan” program, which required participants to register weeks before tickets went on presale, proving they were and bona fide fans and not bots looking to buy tickets for scalpers.
Ticketmaster told The New York Post the program tries to “provide fans with the most reliable access to tickets and combat bad actors that use bots that subvert that process.”
But Verified Fan — which got rebranded to “Taylor Swift Tix” for the tour — has added a controversial feature called “boosts” that promises fans a chance to “improve their position in line to purchase tickets.”
Some boosts cost money, such as pre-ordering the “Reputation” album, shelling out $50 for a T-shirt or purchasing the $60 snake ring that Swift wore in her “Look What You Made Me Do” music video.
Music blogger Bob Lefsetz called Taylor Swift Tix “a tone-deaf scam” that amounts to “upselling with a theoretical benefit” rather than a guarantee of better seats.
By charging higher prices and blocking out scalpers, Swift and her promoter Louis Messina could fatten their coffers by as much as $1.5 million per show, according to an estimate in Billboard.