Ticketmaster still has 170,000 Taylor Swift tickets to offload.
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The news comes about one month after halting the general on-sale for Swift tickets when the demand for Swift’s The Eras Tour crashed the Ticketmaster system.
Now, over the next four weeks, the embattled ticketing platform will look to sell those remaining 170,000 tickets.
In order to do so, Ticketmaster will use the 20-year-old platform, Ticketstoday, which was originally launched as a site for the Dave Matthews Band’s fan club. Live Nation acquired the site in 2008 and it’s still used by bands like Phish. This, the ticketing giant hopes will cut back on wait times.
Swift fans who signed up for the verified pre-sale got emails this week that includes a December 23 deadline to submit ticket purchase requests. Now, when fans look to purchase VIP or other high-demand tickets will enter their credit card info and pricing options in advance rather than being sent to a queue. And if there is more demand than tickets violable, a digital lottery will take place.
When the sale was canceled at its launch earlier this year, Ticketmaster planned for 1.5 million requests and they reportedly got 14 million. Swift fans have since sued the ticketing giant for derelict of duties. There are also now a number of congressional inquiries into the platform.
TMZ reported that a group of fans kicked off the lawsuit in Los Angeles County, where Ticketmaster’s parent company, Live Nation, is located.
The suit accuses the ticketing giant of being poorly prepared for The Eras Tour, even going as far as to call the situation “intentional deception.”
Swift, who recently beat a lawsuit over her “Shake It Off” single, issued a statement when the problems were going on with her pre-sale, saying, “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.”
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