The exorbitant game of buying Taylor Swift tickets in North America, and how Swifties found a way around it | Canada Voices

Tanner Cormier worked with his entire family to try, by his count, nearly four dozen ways to get tickets to Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour concerts in Toronto next month. None of them worked: Resale seats, even with terrible views of the stage, quickly climbed as high as $2,500.

When Cormier saw Swift tour behind the album Reputation in 2018, he had “never felt that level of elation before.” And after spending much of this past year watching the Eras Tour unfold online, he felt desperate to return. Meanwhile, his sister-in-law had gotten tickets with a friend to see Swift in Paris this past May. The week of the show, hearing resale prices had fallen, he checked prices on StubHub and found that he could get a floor seat for about $430.

He bought it, booked a direct flight to Charles-de-Gaulle airport on points and flew out. The flight over was filled with Swifties, and the concert was thrilling. And adding in hotel costs, he spent less than he would have for a nosebleed ticket in Toronto.

“If she announced another run in Europe, I would probably do it again,” Cormier says.

If your social feeds this year were filled with friends at Eras Tour shows abroad, price probably had as much to do with it as the thrill. The resale-ticket aggregator and data provider TicketIQ, which collects data in U.S. dollars, has found that the average listing price for Swift’s November dates in Toronto and Vancouver dates in December is US$6,351 – 225-per-cent higher than European and British dates. The typical minimum price is $1,690, or 77-per-cent higher.

Buying concert and event tickets has become ever-more complicated in the past decade. The market has become profoundly warped. Each event in each city on a given tour can have differing prices. Sometimes tickets are even “dynamically” priced, changing with demand over time, like flight prices.

The rise of ticket resale websites over the past decade and a half only further blurred this market. The complexity has only increased now that Ticketmaster, billing itself as the world’s biggest ticketing marketplace, allows for tickets to be re-sold through its own service at the same time as original ones. This has resulted in a process that can feel profoundly unfair for consumers.

One factor behind the ever-growing complication of ticket buying perhaps simpler than the others: supply and demand. The appetite for Swift tickets appears to be lower in Europe, keeping resellers from pricing them as high as here: “It’s basic math,” says Pascal Courty, a University of Victoria professor who has studied the economics of ticketing for decades.

Canadians, too, had to wait until well after the Eras Tour started to get confirmation of Swift’s Toronto and Vancouver dates: “She created this great sense of scarcity, creating a huge hype, then after, releasing more shows,” Courty says.

Beneath this math lays more than 15 years of changes to e-commerce, regulation and scalping. Over the course of the 2010s, legitimate ticket sellers came to recognize that fans would still pay exorbitant prices for these resellers’ tickets on websites such as StubHub or VividSeats.

Original sellers such as Ticketmaster realized that customers could re-list tickets on their own platforms to authenticate tickets – a strategy to help customers avoid fakes, but with the added benefit of collecting another fee. Hence those “Verified Resale” tickets that appear on many Ticketmaster seating charts – the pink dots that often overtake the sea of blue dots that represent original tickets.

Muddling this, of course, is that every major event gives leeway for performers and their promoters to decide how resales work. And sometimes, systems don’t work well: After reports of hacked accounts that saw Eras Tour tickets mysteriously transferred to other users, Ticketmaster recently let Swift fans know that they could only transfer tickets starting 72 hours before a concert.

Some jurisdictions have made it illegal to resell tickets above a certain price, which appears to play a factor in Swift’s European ticket prices. A German court ruled in 2019 that tickets can’t be resold for more than 25-per-cent above the original price. France has had a law since 1919 blocking resale above face value, though it has conditions – such as being able to resell if you can’t go to a concert – that may let sellers bend the rules.

“The person that I bought the ticket from had a Russian name, so I assume that person was purchasing with the intent of reselling,” Cormier says of his resale ticket to see Swift in Paris.

In Ontario, the former Liberal government tried to impose a resale price cap of 50-per-cent above face value, only to watch the plan walked back by Premier Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservatives as soon as they entered office in 2018.

Sometimes artists impose resale rules themselves – including Oasis, who are requiring Ticketmaster to only allow resellers to list tickets at face value. But price caps and selling restrictions, whether through regulation or artist demand, can be hard to enforce: after tickets to Oasis’s August, 2025 Toronto concerts went on sale last week, tickets began flooding third-party markets.

Every artist has its own level of demand, which itself differs in each market. TicketIQ found that the typical minimum resale ticket prices for Oasis shows are roughly consistent with those in East Rutherford, N.J., around US$285 – much lower than Swift tickets in Canada. In Britain, Oasis’s homeland, average ticket prices are 124-per-cent higher.

Transparency also plays a role in pricing. It’s usually impossible to tell how many tickets are available when they go on sale, which can create a surge of demand that then floods resale markets. The Ontario Liberals planned to force ticket sellers to reveal this number before the PC reversal.

And resale markets rarely show potential buyers how much of a cut they’re taking.

“Those who are benefiting from it are not going to tell unless somebody makes them,” says Catherine Moore, an adjunct professor at the University of Toronto’s music faculty who studies the business.

Transparency may be the key to more consumer-friendly regulation. So, too, could the U.S. Justice Department’s proposal to break up Ticketmaster from its parent, Live Nation Entertainment, which promotes concerts and thus can have has sway over both baseline ticket prices and fees. Right now, Courty says, that “creates an environment not favourable for consumers.”