Taylor Swift performs at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J., on May 26.JUTHARAT PINYODOONYACHET/The New York Times News Service
The chances of getting a ticket to see Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour in Canada were always going to be slim. Immense hype and competition, platform changes to keep bots away, and the fact that many Canadians seem to continue to be spending meant the stakes were high.
To help you feel less bad about missing out on the show (and making sure those who got tickets know how lucky they are), we calculated the odds of getting an access code for Eras tickets in Toronto, based on The Globe and Mail’s Very Unofficial Math.
Let’s start with the Rogers Centre capacity. It’s about 40,000 to 50,000 for a concert, depending on the set-up. Considering capacity is 41,500 for a Blue Jays game, where there is no floor seating, we’ll imagine the Rogers Centre can hold 50,000 lucky people for an Eras show. Swift announced six Toronto performances, bringing the total number of tickets for her stint in Canada to an estimated 300,000.
And if Ticketmaster was giving access codes to registered Verified Fans, assuming each one buys all four of their allotted tickets, that means it would have sent out 75,000 emails with codes and passwords at 7 p.m. ET on Tuesday August 8.
This estimate doesn’t consider the number of tickets saved for members of the Royal Bank of Canada’s loyalty rewards program, or any other program.
Eric Alper, a freelance music publicist, told Amanda Galbraith, guest host on iHeartRadio’s The Vassy Kapelos Show Wednesday that by one estimate, “31 million people submitted to get a wait-list code.”
If 75,000 emails went out, the chances of getting an access code by Alper’s estimate 1 in 413.
In another hypothetical scenario where we don’t know how many Verified Fan registrations there were, we can guess that since there are 32,859,326 Canadians above the age of 15, (Ticketmaster’s minimum age for creating an account is 13, and Statistics Canada releases information in five-year increments) your chances of getting an access code was 1 in 438. (Let’s also assume in this scenario no Americans tried to get Eras Tour tickets to Canadian shows, as the country got 53 of its own performances.)
If your social circle is 413 to 438-people wide, you likely know someone who got a code. Fewer friends than that and you might be out of luck.
You also have to consider the likelihood that fans registered for more than one presale code, with many using multiple e-mails, some even posting videos of excel spreadsheets tracking the registration process, as The Globe’s Stephanie Marotta reports.
If it makes you feel any better, the odds of getting an access code for the Eras Tour tickets were significantly better than the odds of winning Lotto 6/49′s Classic Jackpot, which are approximately 1 in 14 million.