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Perhaps no modern musician has a more dedicated and devoted fanbase than Taylor Swift.
Swift, 33, is currently in the midst of a world-spanning concert tour that is selling out arenas with exorbitant ticket prices and sparking a conversation about the ticket resale market.
Tickets for the Eras Tour are extremely hard to come by, with scalpers and reselling sites snatching up many of the tickets within seconds of them going on sale. The resulting mayhem led to tickets going for hundreds, if not thousands, above their advertised price.
One Swift fan lucky enough to beat the bots and grab a pair of Eras Tour tickets was engineer and TV presenter Emily Calandrelli.
Calandrelli had purchased six tickets for the pop star’s concert at SoFi Stadium on Aug. 3, but decided to sell them. Her initial plan was to sell them on StubHub, the popular ticket reselling website. She wanted to get her money back, and then use whatever additional funds made from the sale to donate to charity.
Instead, Swift’s legion of fans came up with a better idea. Give the tickets away at cost through one of the Taylor-approved reselling services. In exchange, those following the giveaway were encouraged to donate to Calandrelli’s charity of choice.
Calandrelli said she expected to make about $5,000 off the sale on StubHub, but now she’s looking at four-times that. Her verified GoFundMe page has accumulated more than $20,000 and the money keeps coming.
The money will be donated to the Against Malaria Foundation, which helps distribute mosquito nets across Africa, Calandrelli says. The nonprofit organization is also a co-organizer of the fundraising effort.
The Twitter account Eras Tour Resell is giving away Calandrelli’s six tickets as three pairs, to become eligible for the giveaway, you need to like and retweet the post; donations are completely optional, but Swifties are chipping in and going above and beyond.
“Swifties said ‘If you sell these at-cost, we’ll do the donating for you.’ I trusted them,” Calandrelli said.
The giveaway officially ends on July 17 at 2 p.m.
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