Taylor Swift feels your pain: She likens fans’ Ticketmaster woes to ‘bear attacks’
The pop star also hit out at the company for its lack of transparency, but she also highlighted a common sense, rational approach to fan complaints that is being adopted by other companies.
“You have to understand: You have to understand the problem in order to fix it,” she tweeted. “And to get the problem fixed, you have to understand why it is a problem in the first place!”
In response to comments made to the New York Times’ Marc Gunther, Swift said that Ticketmaster’s response to complaints about how expensive tickets are, which rose last year due to the recession, is to charge for the “privilege” of experiencing it — the tickets.
“If you want to complain, complain to the government for letting these companies get away with murder. But complain to the ticket agency for charging you a ticket and you are a fool,” she tweeted. “Make your own damn ticket and you are not.”
In January, Taylor announced her new tour, and the ticket prices were immediately called out as an example of the company’s greedy business practices.
“As I said before the ticket prices reflect the level of service that you get, and not the value you pay for that service,” she tweeted.
That’s not surprising, since fans complained about the price of tickets to Swift’s previous tour, which was announced three months after the start of the current tour — which has been plagued with technical problems, with the company repeatedly claiming that tickets were being sold at below face value.
“Taylor is a wonderful artist & human being, but you do not get this kind of treatment for free,” a fan tweeted at Swift when Taylor’s new tour announced. “Ticketmaster’s greed knows no bounds. It’s why we made so many complaints.”
That response may have been too late. Taylor has previously mentioned on Twitter that she was trying to
