A diehard Taylor Swift fan has revealed she is filled with buyer's remorse after forking out an eye-watering USD$5,500 (AUD$8,285, £4,645) for just two tickets for the singer's upcoming Eras tour.
Paige, who withheld her surname for confidentiality purposes, told Insider she waited in the presale for more than three hours before she turned to resale site StubHub for ticket that were being flipped by scalpers.
Paige revealed prices on the site for tickets were already ranging from USD$5,000 (AUD$7,523, £4,220) to more than USD$30,000 (AUD$45,143, £25,325).
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The diehard Swiftie eventually found two floor seat tickets that came with a price tag of just under USD$2,000 (AUD$3,008, £1,688) each, so she snapped them up.
The whole shebang cost her just over USD$5,500 (AUD$8,273, £4,642) once fees and taxes were added.
But instead of feeling elated at the prospect of seeing her favorite musician in concert for the first time, Paige was filled with regret.
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"I don't feel good to have tickets anymore. It wasn't something fun, like it was supposed to be," she explained to Insider.
"I feel guilty. I feel like I did something impulsive in panic mode, and I am disappointed in Ticketmaster and Live Nation for letting it get to this point of just being a complete frenzy."
"Once I realised how many people were impacted by this and how I fed into what resellers do, which prey on people who are in that panic mode, it didn't feel good anymore."
She went on to reveal she felt ashamed for purchasing the tickets at the massively inflated price.
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"I felt nauseous that I spent so much," she added.
After Ticketmaster royally screwed up the presale for the US leg of Taylor's tour and cancelled the main sale entirely, it wasn't long before tickets were being offloaded on resale sites for extortionate prices, with some tickets going for as much as USD$95,000 each.
After the Hunger Games-style pre-sale, Ticketmaster explained that they had been met with unprecedented demand.
Despite their excuses, the US Justice Department is now investigating Ticketmaster's parent company Live Nation Entertainment over the incident to see if the music ticketing firm has abused its power over the multibillion-dollar live music industry, The New York Times reports.
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Taylor herself issued a statement to apologise to fans and call out Ticketmaster for the 'excruciating' mishandling of her tickets.
"It goes without saying that I'm extremely protective of my fans," she wrote on her Instagram story on November 18.
"It's really difficult for me to trust an outside entity with these relationships and loyalties, and excruciating for me to just watch mistakes happen with no recourse."
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She added: "I'm not going to make excuses for anyone because we asked them, multiple times, if they could handle this kind of demand and we were assured they could."
Topics: Taylor Swift, Music, Entertainment
Rachel Lang