If trying to buy tickets to Taylor Swift‘s upcoming tour felt like “going through several bear attacks,” the Blank Space singer agrees with you.
In a statement posted to Swift’s Instagram account on Friday, the singer criticized Ticketmaster‘s messy handling of ticket sales for her upcoming The Eras Tour.
On Thursday, Ticketmaster cancelled the general public sale after hellish presales left fans experiencing technical difficulties on the company’s website and waiting several hours in queues, only to be unable to make a purchase.
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In her statement, Swift, 32, wrote that she asked Ticketmaster “multiple times if they could handle this kind of demand and we were assured they could.”
She claimed it was “excruciating for me to just watch mistakes happen with no recourse.”
Taylor Swift posted a statement to her Instagram account about Ticketmaster’s sale cancellation on Nov. 17, 2022.
Instagram / @taylorswift
The singer said she has always been “extremely protective” of her fans. She claimed to have brought several elements of her career to her own in-house team over the last few years “SPECIFICALLY to improve the quality of my fans’ experience by doing it myself with my team.”
Swift and her teams are currently working “to figure out how this situation can be improved moving forward,” she wrote.
She also echoed earlier data provided by Ticketmaster that said more than 2.4 million tickets had already been sold for The Eras Tour. She said those who did obtain tickets must have felt like they “went through several bear attacks to get them.”
These tickets were sold as a part of presales on Tuesday and Wednesday.
In her statement’s conclusion, Swift addressed the thousands (if not millions) of disappointed fans who did not score tickets. It did not offer an alternative method of acquiring tickets, or really any other option other than accepting that you won’t be seeing her on tour.
“And to 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. Thank you for wanting to be there. You have no idea how much that means,” she wrote.
On Thursday, Ticketmaster broke the hearts of Swifties everywhere when the company tweeted out the news of the general sale’s cancellation.
“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,” the company wrote.
It remains unclear if the public sale will be rescheduled at some point or if it’s cancelled entirely.
During Tuesday’s “Verified Fan” presale (an attempt by Ticketmaster to limit the number of scalpers and bots buying tickets to popular shows), fans experienced confusing technical outages and queue wait times of up to eight hours.
A Ticketmaster spokesperson told Variety the site’s technical issues were a result of a “staggering number of bot attacks as well as fans who didn’t have invite codes drove unprecedented traffic on our site.” The company said this led to “3.5 billion total system requests — 4x our previous peak.”
By Wednesday, tickets had been pushed onto resale websites like StubHub for tens of thousands of dollars. Reuters reported some early ticketholders were trying to sell their seats for as much as US$28,000 ($37,430).
Originally priced tickets ranged from US$49 ($65) to $449 ($600) each.
The upcoming tour will see Swift, 32, perform 52 shows across the U.S. There are no Canadian dates on Swift’s upcoming tour, but many fans north of the border had planned on heading south to catch a show — but maybe not at these prices.
Ticketmaster merged with Live Nation in 2010, resulting in control of more than 70 per cent of the primary ticketing and live event venues market.
Swift released her latest album, Midnights, in October. The U.S. tour is scheduled to start in March 2023 and end in August.
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