Welcome back, everyone! I hope everyone has recovered from the end of US Eras – with only 2 stops left, we still have a lot of work to do! I know Indianapolis was a disappointing stop for a lot of fans, which I’ll get into a bit more later. However, I hope that Indy hopefuls were still able to make the most of the livestreams and events in the city.

Drops

Overall, the drops for Indianapolis were pretty disappointing from the fan perspective. We knew this was likely to happen for a couple of reasons – not that it makes it any easier to swallow. Firstly, demand for Indianapolis was at an all time high. The city is centrally located with a well-connected airport, making it a popular choice for fans both driving and flying. As the last US stop, it was also the last chance for US-based Swifties without passports. 

Secondly, ticket drop patterns tend to get less successful for fans the more that they are repeated. The first drop in a new pattern tends to go very well for fans – professional resellers are caught off guard and are on a more even playing field with fans. The second drop is usually a little harder. The third time around (Indianapolis) is usually a mess since the pros have figured out how to game the system. Last summer, we typically had a 3-4 show cycle for drop patterns. @Kat_AF13 has a fantastic, in-depth explanation of this phenomenon on Twitter that starts here.

The stage drop happened at 6:02 pm venue time on Thursday, consistent with previous patterns. It’s difficult to estimate inventory for the Indy drops in general due to some technical difficulties, but we think stage drop inventory was around 3,500-4000 tickets per night. Seats were mostly obstructed view and lower bowl, with not much floor availability. Access was pretty consistent with the NOLA data, with slightly fewer verified accounts gaining access and slightly more waitlisted accounts gaining access. About ⅔ of verified accounts and just under half of waitlisted accounts were in.

We did get one new protection from Ticketmaster in this set: protected lightning drops. As a reminder, these are low-inventory drops that occur at random times. For Miami and NOLA, these drops were unprotected: no queue or account restrictions. Anyone could access them. For Indianapolis, these drops were subject to the same queue restrictions as the stage and production drops. Access is consistent with the Miami and NOLA pattern.

Whether we even saw a production drop for Indianapolis is debatable. Typically, inventory is what sets lightning and production drops apart. All of our inventory data points towards there being one main drop (the stage drop) and multiple small drops (lightning drops) with no significant second drop. With the limited floor space available, it’s possible that stage and production inventory were combined for one drop and lightning drops took over what was left.

In my opinion, queued lightning drops are a relatively pointless protection. These drops still don’t have cart timers and you have to have an incredibly low queue spot to even see inventory, let alone purchase anything. They caused a lot of frenzy and meant a lot of people stayed in queues for a long time to no avail. Fans deserve better protections than queued lightning drops. As long as there are no cart timers, these will always favor the bots. 

Sales & Resale

Unfortunately, Indianapolis was not a big success for ticket resale. Despite our best efforts, none of our team members were able to snag extras to sell for face value. Historically, a large amount of our tickets have come from moderators, who use their own accounts or partner with a server member to borrow their verified account. However, we did have 4 last-minute tickets to sell from server members!

Resale was also pretty bleak, as we expected (remember all those indicators of high demand). Inventory spiked after the stage drop, but prices didn’t really drop. Surprisingly, Night 3 fell more than Night 1. I would not expect this to continue, as it goes against the established patterns in pretty much every other city.

Ticketmaster & Professional Resellers

I’m adding a new section this week by special request about the dynamic between fans/professional resellers/Ticketmaster. I’d like to start by reminding everyone that I am on the side of the fans here, and I fully support SWT’s mission of ticket accessibility. This is solely to contextualize what fight we’re fighting and what we already know.

Firstly, it is much more accurate to say that Ticketmaster’s bot protection measures are inadequate rather than missing or non-existent. This is a common sentiment I’ve seen throughout the past few weeks. Protected queues, cart timers, and monitoring for suspicious browsing activity are all protections we’ve gained throughout the Eras Tour to help fans succeed. For the first US shows, the last minute drops had none of these protections. Getting the “pardon our interruption” or “your session has been suspended” messages is absolutely frustrating, but unfortunately it’s very hard to build an accurate bot-detection system that lets all humans pass through. I still think we need and deserve more protections, but there’s no consensus on what would cause the least harm to fans and still hit bots.

Secondly, it’s important to remember that professional resellers are just that: professionals. This is their main source of income. They have significantly more resources to throw at these last minute drops than fans do. They have time and money to build advanced detection systems and bots, and the return is high enough that it’s worth it. SWT’s volunteers do what we do on a shoestring budget compared to these groups. Despite our wider reach now compared to previous cities, we’re not big enough to have a tangible impact on queues in the way that resellers do.

Thirdly, it’s illegal to build our own ticket buying bot. I’ve seen so many comments along these lines, and I agree that it’s a tempting fantasy. However, ticket buying bots violate the BOTS Act and you’ll have to settle for queue detection alerts. These, as well as our inventory tracking program, use publicly available data through the Ticketmaster API, making them perfectly legal.

Looking ahead to Toronto

As I’m writing this, Toronto has already thrown us a few curveballs. We saw a code drop on Monday, fitting neatly into the 10 day before code drop from Summer 2023. On Tuesday, the remaining availability opened up to a handful of verified and waitlisted accounts. I’ll have more thoughts on this in my Toronto post after we have a chance to get some more data. However, we believe this inventory is mostly from the Rogers Center renovations, though it’s possible that some would have always been in a 10-day code sale. Unlike the 3 US venues, Toronto and Vancouver did not have a Venture X sale in September. We think that the Venture X sale replaced the 10-day code sale in the US. Vancouver hopefuls: be on the lookout for potential code texts on/around 11/26. 

In terms of stage and production drops, we’ll be monitoring starting tomorrow. We don’t expect these to be very big: Rogers is a much smaller venue and doesn’t have much obstructed view seating to sell. At this point, I’d guess that we’ll see one stage drop with all 6 nights at once and separate production/lightning drops. In terms of resale, I’d still aim for N1 and N4. In addition to the Night 1 being cheaper phenomenon, they’re also on Thursday and likely to have lower demand since it’s harder to travel for a Thursday night show.