Though thousands of miles separate Cleménce Dubois from the United States, the 20-year-old Parisian has spent months transfixed by what was happening on the other side of the Atlantic — particularly because of Taylor Swift and her much anticipated Eras Tour.
“I was already dreaming of the friendship bracelets I’d make and the outfit I’d wear. My friends and I were already making bets about who’d lose their voice first,” Dubois said in French.
On Tuesday — the day sales opened up for six shows in France — those dreams appeared to come crashing down when Dubois faced an online queue of hundreds of thousands of people. After Ticketmaster’s site glitched, the company announced that ticket sales for the shows in Paris’s La Défense Arena and Lyon’s Groupama Stadium would be halted until further notice.
“When I said I wanted the same experience Americans were getting with Taylor Swift, I didn’t mean the Ticketmaster crash they also had,” Dubois said. “After the mess in the United States, you’d think Ticketmaster would’ve learned its lesson by now.”
La mise en vente Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour de 9h et 11h pour Paris La Défense Arena a été mise en pause. Nous vous tiendrons au courant avec une nouvelle heure de mise en vente dès que possible. Tous les codes non déjà utilisés resteront valables.
— Ticketmaster.fr (@TicketmasterFR) July 11, 2023
Ticketmaster did not immediately respond to a request for comment. On Twitter, the company’s French division said Tuesday morning’s sales were “disrupted by an issue with a third-party vendor” that it did not identify.
“As soon as we saw fans having problems, the queues were put on hold. Any codes not used to purchase tickets today will remain valid,” Ticketmaster tweeted, adding that fans would be notified of the new sale date and time.
The ticketing fiasco in France is the latest to roil Ticketmaster — and the second caused by a chaotic rollout of presale tickets for Swift’s tour. In November, Ticketmaster had to halt sales of the tour’s American leg when the site crashed amid an influx of buyers. The incident enraged Swifties, some of whom filed lawsuits against Ticketmaster and its parent company, Live Nation Entertainment, accusing them of antitrust behavior.
Though Live Nation Entertainment President Joe Berchtold blamed bots for the meltdown, policymakers and fans have questioned whether Ticketmaster’s outsize market dominance is costing consumers.
A congressional hearing in January brought a rare bipartisan moment when Democratic and Republican senators flexed their Swiftie knowledge and condemned the ticket system’s “monopolistic mess,” as Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) put it. The meltdown also sparked a wave of legislative action at the state level, where bills targeting issues like scalping, ticketing and pricing have popped up in states including Texas, Minnesota and New York.
In France, Dubois said she put 20 alarms on her phone to make sure she woke up before the 9 a.m. sale time. She drew a big “13” on her hand, a reference to Swift’s lucky number. Then, she clicked on the link Ticketmaster had sent her the afternoon before and typed in her code — following the instructions the company laid out.
“I thought, ‘Oh, it can’t get worse than like 1,000 in front of me in the queue,’ so I closed my eyes and breathed in for good luck,” Dubois said.
When she opened her eyes, she saw she was behind more than 700,000 people. “As Taylor would say: ‘That was the moment I knew,’” Dubois said. “That was when I felt it in my gut that everything was just going to go downhill from there.”
Though she was losing hope, Dubois stayed online for five more hours, to no avail.
“I just gave up because — how long can you even stay online without moving? As much as I want to go to this concert, I also have a life,” she said.
A place of solace for her after the ordeal: Twitter.
Throughout Tuesday, the platform was awash with French Swifties’ anger.
America + France uniting over their shared hatred of Ticketmaster after this morning's botched Taylor Swift sale. pic.twitter.com/1MiRqbPnau
— Sophie Vershbow (@svershbow) July 11, 2023
Like Dubois, many users shared their experiences with site glitches, impossibly long wait times and frustration with Ticketmaster.
“There was something comforting about seeing so many people vent and hate on Ticketmaster together,” she said. “They became enemy number one for French and American Swifties. And, you know, I think we’re still at the grieving stage after the meltdown, but hopefully we’ll move on to the ‘let’s take action’ stage soon.”