Ticketmaster cancels Taylor Swift ticket sales for public after pre-sale fiasco
NSAI Songwriter-Artist of the Decade honoree, Taylor Swift performs onstage during NSAI 2022 Nashville Songwriter Awards at Ryman Auditorium on September 20, 2022 in Nashville, Tennessee. (Photo by Terry Wyatt/Getty Images)
Ticketmaster says it is canceling Friday's planned general public sale for Taylor Swift's upcoming stadium tour because it doesn't have enough tickets.
The decision came two days after a presale event caused the site to crash and left many fans without tickets. The ticketing company said in a statement Thursday two million tickets to The Eras tour next year were sold during presales on Tuesday, the most tickets ever sold on the platform in a single day.
Ticketmaster cited "extraordinarily high demands on ticketing systems and insufficient remaining ticket inventory to meet that demand" as a reason for calling off Friday's sale.
Questions remain about how remaining tickets — and how many — would be sold. But Ticketmaster said about 1.5 million fans who had gone through an early verification process — called Verified Fan — were invited to purchase tickets and the remaining 2 million were placed on a waiting list.
A company representative said Ticketmaster is not involved in ticket resales for Swift's shows.
It's been a record year for Swift after releasing her latest album "Midnights," which also broke a Billboard record.
READ MORE: Taylor Swift fans crash Ticketmaster site trying to buy ‘Eras Tour’ tickets
The 52-date Eras Tour kicks off March 17 in Glendale, Arizona, and wraps up with five shows in Los Angeles ending Aug. 9. International dates will be announced as well. It’s Swift’s first tour since 2018.
Fans and families around the country battled it out with long queues and error messages to try to race to the checkout cart.
In Tennessee, the state’s attorney general said his office will investigate after receiving numerous complaints about the process.
Taylor Swift accepts an award onstage during the MTV Europe Music Awards 2022 held at PSD Bank Dome on November 13, 2022 in Duesseldorf, Germany. (Photo by Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic)
Ticketmaster said that the site was overwhelmed both by real people and bot attacks resulting in unprecedented traffic on their site. The statement said about 15% of interactions with the site had problems, including errors that caused people to lose tickets after they had waited in an online queue.
READ MORE: Taylor Swift tickets: Your chances of getting them, according to these bookie odds
"While it’s impossible for everyone to get tickets to these shows, we know we can do more to improve the experience and that’s what we’re focused on," the company statement said.
According to calculations by Bookies.com, a website for all things sports betting, fans have a 2% chance (that’s a 1-in-50 shot) of scoring general sale tickets at face value for The Eras Tour.