Tanner Cormier worked with his entire family to try, by his count, nearly four dozen ways to get tickets to Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour concerts in Toronto next month. None of it worked: resold seats quickly rose to as much as $2,500, despite the terrible view of the stage.

When Cormier saw Swift on tour behind the album Call In 2018, he “never felt such a high feeling before.” And after spending much of the past year following the Eras Tour’s development online, he was eager to return. Meanwhile, his sister-in-law had gotten tickets from a friend to see Swift in Paris last May. When he learned the week of the show that resale prices had dropped, he checked prices on StubHub and found he could get a seat in the hall for about $430.

He bought it, used points to book a direct flight to Charles-de-Gaulle airport and took off. The flyover was full of Swifties and the concert was exciting. And when you factor in hotel costs, he spent less than he would for a nosebleed ticket in Toronto.

“If she announced another run in Europe, I would probably do it again,” Cormier says.

If your social media feeds were filled with friends at Eras Tour shows abroad this year, the price probably had as much to do with it as the thrill. Resale ticket aggregator and data provider TicketIQ, which collects data in U.S. dollars, found that the average list price for Swift’s November dates in Toronto and Vancouver dates in December is $6,351 – 225 percent higher than European and British ones appointments. The typical minimum price is $1,690, or 77 percent higher.

Purchasing concert and event tickets has become increasingly complicated over the last decade. The market is deeply distorted. Different prices may apply for each event in each city on a particular tour. Sometimes there are even “dynamic” prices for tickets that change over time with demand, such as: B. Flight prices.

The rise of ticket resale sites over the past decade and a half has only further blurred this market. The complexity has only increased as Ticketmaster, which bills itself as the world’s largest ticketing marketplace, allows tickets to be resold through its own service at the same time as the original tickets. This has resulted in a process that can feel deeply unfair to consumers.

One factor responsible for increasingly complicated ticket purchases is perhaps simpler than the others: supply and demand. Demand for Swift tickets appears to be lower in Europe, discouraging resellers from pricing them as high as they do here: “It’s simple math,” says Pascal Courty, a professor at the University of Victoria who has studied the issue for decades economics of ticket sales.

Canadians also had to wait long after the Eras Tour began for Swift’s dates in Toronto and Vancouver to be confirmed: “She created this big feeling of scarcity, created a huge hype and then released more shows after that,” says Courty.

This bill represents more than 15 years of changes in e-commerce, regulation and scalping. As the 2010s progressed, legitimate ticket sellers realized that fans would still pay exorbitant prices for these resellers’ tickets on sites like StubHub or VividSeats.

Original sellers like Ticketmaster realized that customers could relist tickets on their own platforms to authenticate tickets – a strategy to help customers avoid counterfeits, but with the added benefit of charging another fee. Hence the “Verified Resale” tickets that appear on many Ticketmaster seating charts – the pink dots that often outnumber the sea of ​​blue dots that represent original tickets.

What makes matters worse is that at every major event, artists and their organizers are given the opportunity to decide how resales work. And sometimes systems don’t work well: After reports of hacked accounts where Eras Tour tickets were mysteriously transferred to other users, Ticketmaster recently told Swift fans that they could only transfer tickets starting 72 hours before a concert.

Some jurisdictions have banned the resale of tickets above a certain price, which appears to play a role in Swift’s European ticket prices. A German court ruled in 2019 that tickets cannot be resold for more than 25 percent above the original price. France has had a law banning resales above face value since 1919, although there are conditions – such as the ability to resell if you can’t go to a concert – that may allow sellers to get around the rules.

“The person I bought the ticket from had a Russian name, so I assume that person made the purchase with the intention of reselling it,” Cormier says of his Swift in Paris resale ticket.

In Ontario, the former Liberal government tried to impose a resale price cap of 50 percent above face value, but saw Premier Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservatives withdraw the plan immediately after taking office in 2018.

Sometimes artists themselves set resale rules — including Oasis, which requires Ticketmaster to only allow resellers to offer tickets at face value. But price caps and sales restrictions, whether through regulation or artist demand, can be difficult to enforce: After tickets for Toronto’s Oasis concerts in August 2025 went on sale last week, tickets began flooding third-party markets.

Each artist has their own demand, which in turn varies in each market. TicketIQ has found that the typical minimum resale prices for Oasis shows are similar to those in East Rutherford, New Jersey, and are about $285 – much lower than Swift tickets in Canada. In the UK, Oasis’ home country, average ticket prices are 124 percent higher.

Transparency also plays a role in pricing. It is usually impossible to tell how many tickets will be available at the time of sale, which can lead to a surge in demand which then floods resale markets. The Ontario Liberals planned to force ticket sellers to reveal that number before the PC reversal.

And resale markets rarely show potential buyers what price they’re willing to pay.

“Those who benefit from it won’t tell unless someone makes it,” says Catherine Moore, an associate professor at the University of Toronto’s music faculty who studies the business.

Transparency could be the key to more consumer-friendly regulation. This also applies to the US Department of Justice’s proposal to separate Ticketmaster from its parent company Live Nation Entertainment, which markets concerts and thus influences basic ticket prices and fees. Right now, says Courty, “this creates an environment that is unfavorable to consumers.”