Ticketmaster left millions of Taylor Swift fans disappointed yesterday (Nov. 17) as the public on-sale for her highly-anticipated The Eras Tour was cancelled due to “extraordinarily high demands.”
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Days prior, the Ticketmaster site experienced significant delays after millions of fans signed on to purchase pre-sale tickets to Swift’s 2023 concerts. After all was said and done, many disappointed fans turned their attention to Swift, who was notably silent on the issue – until today.
“Well. It goes without saying that I’m extremely protective of my fans,” the pop singer wrote on her Instagram stories. “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 about my fans as I do.”
She continued, “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 why 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. 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.”
She wrote that it is “truly amazing” that 2.4 million people were able to get tickets but that it “pisses me off” that they had to go through “several bear attacks” to get them.
She concluded her statement by saying, “And to those that didn’t get tickets, all I can say is that my hope is to provide more opportunities for us all to get together and sing these songs. Thank you for wanting to be there. You have no idea how much that means.”
Ticketmaster announced the cancellation of Friday’s public tickets sales on Twitter. “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.”
Though around two million fans secured tickets – despite a number of tech mishaps – the 1.5 million verified Swift fans estimated for the pre-sale somehow turned into 14 million, which the platform was not able to handle.
“It’s a function of Taylor Swift,” Live Nation Chairman and CEO of Liberty Media Greg Maffei told CNBC’s Squawk on the Street. “The site was supposed to open up for 1.5 million verified Taylor Swift fans. We had 14 million people hit the site, including bots, which are not supposed to be there.”
(Photo by VALERIE MACON/AFP via Getty Images)
