My daughter is a Swiftie, so she has been spending the past few days collecting mobile numbers and email addresses in order to register for a lottery that will allow her to win a code that will supposedly grant her special status when it comes to purchasing highly coveted tickets for the Taylor Swift concert in Singapore that is scheduled on March 2024.
Highly coveted is the root word here, because Taylor Swift only has 2 concert venues in SouthEast Asia: Singapore and Japan, which means my daughter who is dreaming of scoring tickets, will be competing with fellow Swifties from more or less a dozen countries.
My wife and I are not shooting down her Eras tour dream outright because we are aware of just how difficult it is to score tickets. Our daughter still has to somehow win the lottery, or has to go through the gauntlet in order to get a reasonably priced concert ticket, and considering the chances and the competition, we are even wishing her the best of luck.
When Taylor Swift’s 2023 Eras tour was announced, the presale of tickets in the USA was a calamity for Ticketmaster, which encountered service delays and website crashes blamed on a surge of unregistered fans and billions of bots. Those failures pissed of Swift, who said she was assured they could handle the demand, and even US House of Representatives and the Department of Justice got involved. Hopefully, Ticketmaster has upgraded its system and scoring tickets won’t be that difficult anymore, but it is what it is.
If our daughter is successful in this endeavor of hers, then I guess the family entertainment/travel budget will just have to deal with it somehow.
Being in this situation reminds me of how fortunate today’s youth are. Back in my day, there was almost zero chance of getting to see any of our favorite artists live in concert. This was because they either didn’t go to Manila (certainly not Bacolod), and if they did hold concerts in the region, international travel was expensive and inaccessible, and scoring tickets in advance almost impossible. Most of all, there was no way my parents would let me spend on a luxury like concert tickets in Metro Manila, much more a foreign country, even if I was the singer/bands’ number one fan.
These days, giant international stars like Coldplay, Harry Styles, and recently, Bruno Mars, regularly set concert dates in Metro Manila, and even if the Philippines is not included, going to Singapore, Japan or Hong Kong is always an option because isn’t that much more expensive or difficult anymore.
This accessibility to international talent is probably why Filipino Swifties are up in arms over why Taylor didn’t have the Philippines as part of the Asian leg of her tour. After all, according to my little Swiftie, the Filipino contingent is a pretty significant one.
However, if you come to think of it and look at the other two countries in the Asian leg of the Eras tour, we would see that our dear Philippines is stacked up against two of the top countries in the world: Singapore and Japan. These highly developed countries with solid reputations for safety and excellent logistics, may have been at par with the Philippines back in the 1960s, but we have been left far behind since then, and that is why it is a no-brainer for an international star like Taylor Swift to pick the countries that she did, especially if she only had to choose 2. The Filipinos may have the numbers and the passion for her, but in the real world, everything else has to make sense. Sadly, our country is still far behind in terms of being a friendly place for any major and serious investor, and when it comes down to being practical, nobody will choose the Philippines over Japan or Singapore. The only reason for an international superstar to pick a Philippine event would be our awesome sing-along powers, which must matter in the calculus, but there are other things that matter more when it comes to grand productions, such as security, logistics, tech, and probably the ease of doing business.
Some may say that she did it before, in 2014, and perhaps that is why our country has to keep on improving and not backslide instead. Maybe the country was a better place to consider back then, and it doesn’t seem like a good idea anymore these days. If Swifties want her to come back, they might have to consider putting more competent people in charge of the country so we can truly compete toe to toe with powerhouses like Singapore and Japan, even when it comes to just attracting global entertainment superstars.*
