Outraged Swifties are calling for Taylor to take action after Ticketmaster cancelled the public sale for Swift’s Eras Tour.
In a tweet Nov. 16, Ticketmaster said, “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.”
Swift has yet to comment on the ticket sales, which have already secured a record for the most tickets sold by an artist in a single day, according to Ticketmaster. The process, which has been long and difficult for many, has left millions of fans empty-handed after Ticketmaster called off the sale.
Ticketmaster released a full statement explaining why the sale was cancelled, saying the demand for tickets “broke” their website.
“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,” the statement reads.
After days of disastrous pre-sale purchasing and wildly inflated prices from resellers, fans are not happy with the ticket-selling platform.
Tickets are popping up on StubHub for up to $2,000. Even seats at the top of the stadium are in the $500 range.
Despite the uproar surrounding the price hikes on resale tickets, Ticketmaster said the verified fan pre-sale effectively stopped “scalpers” from snatching tickets and selling them at a profit.
“90% fewer tickets are currently posted for resale on secondary markets than a typical on sale, which is exactly why the artist team wanted to use Verified Fan to sell their tickets,” Ticketmaster said. “Ticketmaster is not currently reselling any Taylor tickets.”
BYU student Keli Fossett said she doesn’t think the pre-sale worked for as well as it was supposed to.
“It’s been hard, ’cause I feel like a lot of people who actually are true fans did not get the tickets,” she said. After missing the pre-sale, Fossett was able to get tickets, though the process was difficult.
“It was so stressful and kind of traumatizing, but I am glad that I was able to get tickets even though they are nosebleeds,” she said.
Camille Krieger from Colorado did not get a ticket in pre-sale, but said she is not too worried about ticket sales going forward. She understands the distress for hardcore Swifties, however.
“I probably won’t lose any sleep over it, but I’m just kind of frustrated that, like, it’s come to this,” she said. “If it’s sold out on pre-sale then it might have been an error on, like, administration’s part of giving out too many pre-sale codes.”
Administrative mistakes or not, Ticketmaster pointed out that there will always be disappointed fans.
“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,” they said.
