Demand for Taylor Swift concert tickets peaks when Ticketmaster cancels public on-sale date – Pitchfork

Taylor Swift doesn’t begin her Eras Tour for four months, but it’s become increasingly difficult for fans to get tickets to the shows. Tickets went on sale Tuesday, November 15 through Ticketmaster’s Verified Fan program. The program requires potential spectators to register in advance and rank their preferred cities and attendance dates. The idea is to reduce the number of bots that historically rush for tickets before real fans can buy them.

Ticketmaster said more than 3.5 million people signed up as verified fans and more than 2 million tickets were sold on Tuesday, and that was before a second presale window even opened for Capital One cardholders. As a result, Ticketmaster’s website was flooded with traffic, receiving 3.5 billion total system requests, four times the site’s previous record. As a result, users encountered technical difficulties and long waiting times before they had the opportunity to purchase tickets. The problems were exacerbated apparently due to a “staggering number of bot attacks as well as fans who did not have invite codes”.

Now, Ticketmaster has announcement: “Due to extraordinarily high demands on the ticketing systems and insufficient ticket inventory remaining to meet this demand, tomorrow’s public on-sale for Taylor Swift | The Eras tour has been cancelled.

In a statement Friday, Swift wrote:

Good. It goes without saying that I am extremely protective of my fans. We’ve been doing this together for decades and over the years I’ve brought so many elements of my career in-house. I did this SPECIFICALLY to improve the quality of the experience for my fans by doing it myself with my team who care about my fans as much as I do. It’s really hard for me to trust an outside entity with these relationships and loyalties, and excruciating for me to just watch mistakes happen without recourse.

There are a myriad of reasons why people have had such a hard time trying to get tickets and I’m trying to figure out how this can be improved in the future. I’m not going to excuse anyone because we asked them, many times, if they could handle this kind of request, we were assured they could. It’s truly amazing that 2.4 million people got tickets, but it really pisses me off that so many of them feel like they’ve suffered multiple bear attacks to get them.

And to those who didn’t get tickets, all I can say is that my hope is to give us more opportunities to come together and sing these songs. Thank you for wanting to be there. You have no idea what that means.

On Friday night, Ticketmaster followed up with a statement on Twitter“We want to apologize to Taylor and all of her fans, especially those who had a terrible experience trying to purchase tickets,” the company wrote. “We feel we owe it to everyone to share information to help explain what happened.”

Ticketmaster also shared a link to a page titled “Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour On Sale Explained. The page offers a breakdown of the issues that led to the sale being cancelled.

This article was originally published Thursday, November 17 at 4:45 p.m. EST. It was last updated Nov. 20 at 10:42 a.m. EST.