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Chantal Crowell just wants her life back.
She is tired of waking up early to hear a clue on the radio. She has had enough of googling for hours, trying to parse the little information she’s been given. She never wants to pull over in the middle of traffic to call into a radio show again.
In under two weeks, it will all, mercifully, be over.
“I (am) literally losing sleep over this,” Crowell said. “It’s taking away from my life. My husband thinks I’m nuts.”
Remarkably, Crowell is on the low end. Among those who obsessively enter ticket contests for Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, Crowell’s 30 entries — mostly through radio stations in the Ottawa area, where she lives — are rookie numbers. Beckie Turner, from the Orillia area, estimates she’s entered 130 contests. Georgina, Ont.’s Lisa Fockler is at 150 and counting.
Rogers, the marquee sponsor of Swift’s Toronto stop, says it has seen more than 1 million total entries for its contests, including nearly 100,000 this month in Instagram giveaways alone. Another contest, run by the SickKids Foundation, saw thousands of entries in the first 24 hours, a spokesperson said.
It’s a real-life golden ticket to Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. And for those unbelievably lucky few who get it, it’s like winning the lottery — only better, because the lottery rolls around every week. The Eras Tour is the most lucrative concert tour the world has ever seen, and once it wraps in Toronto and Vancouver, it’s done forever.
It’s enough to turn ticket hunting into a lifestyle.
“It is all consuming,” Fockler said. “It is all hands on deck.”
Fockler spends hours every day trying to find her trip to the promised land. She hasn’t given up on resale tickets yet — she’s still glued to StubHub to see if tickets drop below the $3,000 price tag for obstructed-view seats — but is simultaneously checking for new contests, scrolling social media and listening to the radio.
The Toronto Star is running its own contest to raise money for the Santa Claus Fund, which provides gift boxes to financially vulnerable children in Toronto.
Fockler has changed her office’s music from Spotify to 98.1 CHFI, one of many stations running ticket giveaways. Her 11 colleagues are helping, too.
“None of them are Taylor Swift fans,” Fockler said. “They’re putting up with it.”
Turner has had as many as four radio stations going at the same time. She’s fallen asleep with her phone by her pillow, just in case a radio station calls to offer tickets before she wakes up.
She has help. After missing out on the verified fan sale back in August 2023, she connected on Facebook with a stranger, Skye Jackson, who lives in Kingston, Ont. They’ve been trading contests ever since. When a bowling alley in Kingston held a giveaway, Turner, 300 kilometres away, heard about it and entered.
Turner and Jackson are strangers no more. They’ve sent each other Christmas and birthday gifts — all of which are, naturally, Swift-themed.
Turner is motivated by her daughter Isabelle. The 17-year-old has had a tough year, Turner said, bullied to the point where she changed schools. But for more than a decade, Isabelle has loved Swift, grabbing random CDs in the car and enjoying Swift’s hits with her mother.
The companies that run these contests have their own motivations. Contests are a marketing tool, said University of Toronto professor David Soberman. People like Crowell will listen to a radio station for hours on end if it means a chance to win big.
“We’ve listened to some bad music we normally wouldn’t listen to,” Crowell said.
There’s a data collection component, too. These companies now have thousands of emails, phone numbers and addresses they didn’t before.
“You get a list of people that are probably pretty loyal users,” Soberman said, “and you can use that.”
Some people are winning, of course. Jess Winger, a 37-year-old mother of two in Cambridge, Ont., entered only six contests before she struck it big with a Rogers giveaway on Instagram in September. She already had partial-view seats — her husband Zach spent $4,500 for two tickets and gifted them at Christmas last year — but has since raffled those off to get the money back.
Most others are coming up empty-handed. That hasn’t stopped them.
“You gotta keep trying,” Turner said, “because how else would you win?”
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