Bonnie Gross, a production coordinator from New York City, waited over six hours struggling with the Ticketmaster website. When she finally got the chance to purchase tickets, inventory was scarce.
“I get to page where I can buy tickets and there are no seats available. There is one seat available,” Gross, 28, said. “It was a single seat alone, all the way like at the edge of the stadium for like 200 something dollars. And I was like, ‘I’m not going to go alone, you know?’”
Multiple Swift fans said they rearranged their schedules to accommodate the sale on Tuesday morning, including taking the day off work, rescheduling a meeting and a high school student who skipped school with her mother’s permission.
Swift, one of the most renowned songwriters and hitmakers of her generation, has also been a meticulous manager of her brand and an unparalleled marketer on a mass scale. During a recent period of productivity, which has included five album releases in just over two years, she has expanded her merchandise operation to include everything from picture frames and sticky notes to cassette tapes and vinyl LPs in various limited-edition colors.
“Midnights,” Swift’s 10th studio LP, was released last month, shocking the industry by selling the equivalent of 1,578,000 copies in the United States — the largest total for any album in seven years. In a Billboard first, songs from “Midnights” occupied the entire Top 10 on the singles chart.
The album, a return to a mainstream pop sound for Swift, followed her pair of surprise pandemic albums, “Folklore” and “Evermore,” which tried on a quieter, indie-folk style. “Folklore” won album of the year at the Grammys in 2021, and was followed by “Fearless (Taylor’s Version)” and “Red (Taylor’s Version),” the first two rerecordings of her early albums, a side project Swift undertook to regain control of her recordings after her former record label was sold without her participation.
