As sophomore Ella Kissinger looks at her calendar, she counts down the days until she sees Taylor Swift in the Eras Tour.

“I am excited to go to her concert and see her perform in person,” Kissinger said. “Seeing music performed live is such a special experience and I am especially excited since I love Taylor Swift. When people hate Taylor Swift, I feel like they are insecure about their own music taste.”

Language Arts teacher David Thompson also has tickets for the concert. Thompson has never seen her in concert before.

“I think that [Swift’s] concert is going to be crazy big, like all over the place and having all these dates,” Thompson said. “She’s the type that likes to put on a really big show to show the fact that it’s all her eras [of musical development]. I haven’t necessarily loved every single era of Taylor Swift, but I adore so many of them.”

The Eras Tour tickets sold on Ticketmaster starting Nov. 15, and within hours, the site crashed. This left many fans like junior Lily Goodman without the ability to get tickets, which according to Sssamiti.org ranged from $49-$449 or VIP passes, which ranged from $199-$899.

“I initially planned on going because I was invited by a friend, but I found out how much tickets were, and I wasn’t sure,” Goodman said. “Then she said she couldn’t get one because of the waitlist, and I wasn’t as disappointed as I thought I’d be. I was relieved, since I realized I didn’t feel like giving my money to her.”

Kissinger was aware of the site crash.

“I have heard a lot about the way they controlled the presale and the distribution of tickets,” Kissinger said. “The sites got flooded by [too] many people on the site at the same time and constantly kicked people out of their place in the queue.”

A controversy arose around Ticketmaster considering their dominance in ticket-brokering. On Jan. 24, Congress met to discuss the controversy with several members referencing Swift’s songs. Thompson said the system is to blame.

“I understand the system went down and it was a disaster,” Thompson said. “But, the fans aren’t at fault. I don’t think Taylor Swift’s necessarily at fault [either].”

Complaints about Ticketmaster have come from other artists and bands, such as the Seattle grunge band Pearl Jam in 1994, but did not gain as much traction as Swift.

“This opened eyes [of] a lot of people [making them ask], ‘Is there some sort of monopoly happening?’” Thompson said. “There’s other places like SeatGeek and Gametime that I’ve used before to buy sports tickets, but it always ultimately sends you to a ticket on Ticketmaster. So I thought it was pretty interesting when all this came out because Ticketmaster got shut down. It was going crazy, breaking the servers. Maybe there should just be a different system, a different plan for how to approach these sorts of events. So I don’t know too much about what’s really going on logistically, the legality of it, but I think the system needs to be fixed for huge, worldly events like this.”