Minnesota lawmakers have made its “Taylor Swift Bill” official.
Governor Tim Walz signed House File 1989, itself a reference to Swift’s birth year and album of the same name, into law on Tuesday, May 7. The law will now require Ticketmaster and other live event promoters to share details about additional fees and prohibit resellers from counterfeiting tickets. House File 1989 will apply to any ticket purchased in Minnesota or other states for shows held in the northern state.
Congresswoman Kelly Moller had proposed the legislation in 2023 following fan pandemonium regarding securing tickets for Swift’s Eras Tour.
Swift, 34, announced in 2022 that she was hitting the road for the first time in four years, selling tickets via Verified Fan presale to help weed out bots from snatching up all the tickets and reselling them for exorbitant prices.
Moller, for her part, was one of the fans who struggled to secure tickets to the July 2023 shows in Minneapolis, finding that the Ticketmaster system crashed during on-sale dates and bots were not being stopped from reselling the seats for inflated prices.
Swift later spoke out about the Ticketmaster drama.
“Well. It goes without saying that I’m extremely protective of my fans. We’ve been doing this for decades together and over the years, I’ve brought so many elements of my career in house,” she wrote in a lengthy Instagram Story statement in November 2022. “I’ve done this SPECIFICALLY to improve the quality of my fans’ experience by doing it myself with my team who care as much about my fans as I do. 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.”
The 14-time Grammy winner continued: “There are a multitude of reasons why people had such a hard time trying to get tickets and I’m trying to figure out how this situation can be improved moving forward.”
While Swift was not “going to make excuses for anyone,” she claimed that her team asked Ticketmaster “multiple” times if they could handle the fan demand at her NFL stadium shows.
“We were assured they could,” Swift alleged in her post. “It’s truly amazing that 2.4 million people got tickets, but it really pisses me off that a lot of them feel like they went through several bear attacks to get them.”
Swift’s sold-out Eras shows kicked off in March 2023 in Arizona before she traversed the U.S. with performances in Minneapolis, Kansas City — now famously the catalyst of her romance with Travis Kelce — and more. Her international tour dates began in November 2023 and will run through the end of 2024.
