[UPDATE 11/18/22]: Taylor Swift on Friday shared an update on the week’s Ticketmaster chaos on her Instagram story.
“Well. It goes without saying that I’m extremely protective of my fans. We’ve been doing this for decades together and over the years, I’ve brought so many elements of my career in house. I’ve done this SPECIFICALLY to improve the quality of my fans’ experience by doing it myself with my team who care as much about my fans as I do. It’s really difficult for me to trust an outside entity with these relationships and loyalties, and excruciating for me to just watch mistakes happen with no recourse.
“There are a multitude of reasons my people had such a hard time trying to get tickets and I’m trying to figure out how this situation can be improved moving forward,” she continued. “I’m not going to make excuses for anyone because we asked them, multiple times, if they could handle this kind of demand and we were assured they could. It’s truly amazing that 2.4 million people got tickets, but it really pisses me off that a lot of them feel like they went through several bear attacks to get them.”
She added, referencing the canceled public on-sale originally due to take place on Friday, “And to all those who didn’t get tickets, all I can say is that my hope is to provide more opportunities for us to all get together and sing these songs.”
[11/17/22]: Ticketmaster has canceled the general public on-sales for tickets to the Taylor Swift Eras Tour, citing “extraordinarily high demands.”
This announcement comes after Tuesday’s Ticketmaster Taylor Swift pre-sale was marred by technical difficulties. The ticketing giant, which merged with Live Nation in 2010, allowed fans to sign up for a pre-sale code before the markets opened on Tuesday. The company had only expected 1.5 million users to show up but instead, according to Live Nation chairman Gregg Maffei, the website was overloaded by 14 million visitors, some of which were believed to be bots.
Due to extraordinarily high demands on ticketing systems and insufficient remaining ticket inventory to meet that demand, tomorrow’s public on-sale for Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour has been cancelled.
— Ticketmaster (@Ticketmaster) November 17, 2022
A statement from Ticketmaster notes that 1.5 million fans were able to purchase tickets instantly, with an additional two million sent to a waitlist. The company ultimately set a personal record by selling over two million tickets on Tuesday, the most for any single artist in one day.
“Historically, working with Verified Fan invite codes has worked as we’ve been able to manage the volume coming into the site to shop for tickets,” Ticketmaster said in a statement. “However, this time the staggering number of bot attacks as well as fans who didn’t have invite codes drove unprecedented traffic on our site, resulting in 3.5 billion total system requests — 4x our previous peak.”
“Even when a high demand on sale goes flawlessly from a tech perspective, many fans are left empty handed,” Ticketmaster continued. “For example: based on the volume of traffic to our site, Taylor would need to perform over 900 stadium shows (almost 20x the number of shows she is doing)… that’s a stadium show every single night for the next 2.5 years.”
Ticketmaster has not announced how it will proceed with selling the remainder of its Taylor Swift The Eras Tour ticket inventory.
This is a developing story