Taylor Swift is prohibiting bringing water or food into her concerts. And that has legal problems and deadly risks

The promoter of Taylor Swift’s concerts in Spain and Portugal has made the demands clear to those attending the concerts, and It has not been liked by fans: You cannot enter with any type of container or portable batteries. Beyond questions of comfort, there is a tragic precedent that advises against this measure: the death of a concert attendee due to heat stroke in Rio de Janeiro.

Prohibition. From his Twitter account, the concert promoter of Taylor Swift in Madrid on May 29 and 30 has prohibited entry with bottles of any kind. First it banned glass or metal containers with a capacity of more than 50 cl, but a few hours later it banned any type of container or bottle. Access to the premises with portable batteries was also prohibited. The tweet from which the ban was launched has been removed from social networks, so it is possible that the measure will be qualified in the coming days.

The terrible precedents. Last November, a 23-year-old attendee of Swift’s The Eras Tour concert at the Nilton Santos Olympic Stadium in Rio de Janeiro died due to heat stroke. High temperatures of more than forty degrees had been hitting the area for several days, but the promoter of the event in Brazil, Time For Fun (T4F), did not allow entry with bottles. Several attendees were treated for heat stroke, the artist interrupted the concert at one point to ask for water for a person 30 meters from the stage, and even went so far as to throw a bottle to the public that I was asking for it.

Many people. The Santiago Bernabeu, venue for the two Taylor Swift concerts in Madrid, has a capacity of 85,000 people for sporting events. For concerts and other types of events, this capacity is significantly reduced to 65,000 people. An absolutely unusual demand that has not only generated problems in the purchase of tickets, but has unleashed a parallel trade on resale websites that move on the edge of what is legal, and where VIP tickets have been seen for the concert at almost 6,000 euros.

Lack of legal protection. Consumer associations have been denouncing this type of practices by promoters for some time. In 2023, for example, Facua denounced a series of festivals (it had already done so previously, with 40 complaints in 2019, which culminated in the first opening of file for a festival for these reasons) for not allowing entry to the enclosures with water or food. There are no specific laws with prohibitions on the subject but neither are there any that grant that right to the public, so they are open to free interpretation.

Law of free interpretation. To file these complaints, Facua relies on article 82.1 of Royal Legislative Decree 1/2007, of November 16, of the General Law for the Defense of Consumers and Users. There, abusive clauses are defined as “all those stipulations not individually negotiated and all those practices not expressly consented to that, contrary to the requirements of good faith, cause, to the detriment of the consumer and user, a significant imbalance in the rights and obligations of the parts arising from the contract”.

The Helm case. In December of last year, the Yelmo cinema chain had to pay a fine of 30,000 euros for not allowing food purchased abroad into its theaters. FACUA’s main argument for this complaint was basically that “a cinema is not a restaurant”, and therefore the ban was out of place. The court ruled in favor of the complainants, but at the moment it has not ruled so strongly on the festivals, since their defenders they claim that a macro-concert is also “a gastronomic event.” What Taylor Swift has to figure out is what category her mammoth concerts fall into.

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