Massachusetts father donated $21,000 so his daughter and friends could attend the Taylor Swift concert

A dad spent $21,000 for his daughter and his friends to see Taylor Swift’s sold-out concert over the weekend — after he said their first tickets never arrived.

Anthony Silva paid the King’s ransom last week after the tickets he bought in November for Swift’s Friday stop at Gillette Stadium still hadn’t arrived – forcing him to rush to another venue to make sure his adult daughter was still alive. could be present.

Additional costs included the fact that the pop star’s show – part of her astronomically priced Era’s Tour – was sold out, and the detail that Silva paid not only for daughter Katlyn, 19, but also for her three friends. They were transported to the event by limousine.

In November, the doting dad says he was one of more than 14 million who flocked to third-party sites to buy seats for Swift’s show, crashing one due to what Variety called a “historically unprecedented demand” at the time.

Fortunately, he was able to secure four seats – for a still hefty $1,800. However, after half a year came and went and he was still without tickets, he now insists that the third party seller forced him and has to issue a refund.

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“This just doesn’t add up,” the Massachusetts father told WCVB Friday in a video interview outside his home in Foxborough, as Katlyn and her companions excitedly got ready for the show.

He slammed the platform where he bought the first four tickets, Stubhub, and snapped, “In my opinion, they shouldn’t wait until the day before to send the tickets.”

Silva told the outlet that he still didn’t have the first four tickets on the day the show was due to be held.

He said just a day earlier, when he contacted the company to ask where his tickets were, he was told his purchase for the notoriously hard-to-book event had fallen through, forcing him to come up with a last-minute plan.

Alternative tickets to the show Stubhub reportedly said were not an option.

“I went home smashing things, I was so angry, so disappointed because I was looking forward to this for nine months,” Katlyn Friday recalled when she was struck by the reality that she might one day be able to do the Foxborough portion of Swift’s seventh tour. miss – the singer’s first since she canceled one in 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

In typical daddy fashion, Silva said he used the revelation as an opportunity to prank his daughter — one in which he pretended to accept her and her friends’ Swift-less fate.

“We were playing a joke when we told them the tickets were really gone yesterday,” Silva recalled with a wry smile as Katlyn and her crew dressed for the oncoming limousine.

‘And the look on their faces – I never want to see it again. One girl had a quivering lip,” he added. ‘It was heavy. It was heavy.’

After that scare, Silva said he brought the good news that he had paid the bill for all four young women – leaving the group ecstatic as WCVB camera crews filmed them getting ready.

The limousine, also paid for by Silva as part of his now gargantuan Christmas present, then took the four to the venue, where they found themselves among the approximately 60,000 in attendance.

Swift was going to put on a smashing show – and Kaylyn and her friends were quick to show their appreciation.

“We were running out of tickets for an event we were looking forward to [to] since Christmas,” said a visibly grateful Alyssa Camara, as she and the three others excitedly applied makeup and styled their hair for the show.

“We haven’t stopped talking about the event since the day we found out.”

She remembered how Silva surprised them with the tickets—which were actually better than the ones he’d bought from Stubhub before—“I was so excited. I was like crazy.

As for Silva, he said that despite losing “About $21,000,” it was worth it to see his daughter and his friends happy. He added that StubHub should issue him a refund for his original purchase price of $1,800 within 10 days, but he is still furious with how the seller handled the ordeal.

“I think it’s for no reason but for incompetence through the third party or through StubHub,” he snapped Friday as Katyln and her friends buzzed in the background.

Stubhub’s alleged scheduling oversight comes amid a slew of scheduling conflicts for Swift’s Sacred Era’s Tour that caused competitor Ticketmaster to crash in November.

The chaos of more than 14 million Swifties — when the website had forecast just 4 million beforehand — led to an out-of-control resale market that saw concert tickets go for tens of thousands of dollars.

At the time, Stubhub was offering seats for a show in Florida ranging from $500 to $42,000 each — while initial tickets, for comparison, initially cost between $73 and $666.

Some 320 fans subsequently filed a lawsuit against the ticket giant and its parent company, Live Nation, for “deliberately” charging “skyrocketing fees” and selling the “tickets to scalpers.”

The anticipated tour also made headlines recently thanks to an odiligent security guard who found himself at the center of the drama at Taylor Swiftconcert in Philadelphia, prompting Swift to speak out and bring the set to a halt.

Economists say the popularity of the tour – billed as a journey through the 33-year-old singer’s various “musical eras” – has been fueled in part by the pandemic, which has given fans a newfound appreciation for live concerts and experiences.

When the tickets first went on sale last November, University of Maryland economics professor Melissa Kearney told Bloomberg: ‘The pandemic in general has changed the way people think about what really matters to them and what brings them joy.’

Other outlets have reported how long fans will save for a ticket.

That told the 27-year-old superfan Lindsey Morris in November Buzz feed that she had a separate savings account to save for Taylor Swift tickets.