Ticketmaster has canceled the public sale of tickets, scheduled to take place Friday, Nov 18, for Taylor Swift’s upcoming “Eras” concert tour in the latest fiasco involving a company that has drawn outrage from fans and politicians alike.
“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’s ‘The Eras Tour’ has been cancelled,” the company tweeted on Thursday.
Ticketmaster has not announced any move to reschedule the public general sale.
Earlier this week, the site experienced difficulties keeping up with presale demand from the Verified Fan program through which a lucky lottery of those who signed up were promised presale access codes for Nov. 15.
While many fans received emails detailing their selection followed by text messages with their unique numerical access codes, some received waitlist emails. Then on Tuesday morning, when some tried unlocking the presale with their codes, the codes did not work.
According to Liberty Media CEO Greg Maffei, who sat down with CNBC’s David Faber to discuss the extremely high demand for tickets to Swift’s long-awaited concert tour, “The site was supposed to be opened up for 1.5 million verified Taylor Swift fans.”
Maffei explained that 14 million fans visited Ticketmaster, and that amount of traffic could have filled 900 stadiums.
Ticketmaster’s handling prompted outcry from Swift fans as well as prominent politicians. not only stirred outrage among Swift’s fans, but also caught the ire of politicians. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Tuesday called Ticketmaster a “monopoly” and suggested that its 2009 merger with LiveNation be undone, while Sen. Amy Klobuchar sent an open letter to the company’s CEO expressing “serious concerns” about the company’s operations.
The snafu caused on the day of the verified fan presale pushed the second tier of advanced purchases — through possession of a Capital One credit card — back a full day. The Pacific time slots for locations like Los Angeles, Santa Clara, Arizona and Seattle were bumped back from 10a.m. to 3p.m., and fans still waited in hour-plus online queues.
The website now contains an entire page devoted to explaining why the high demand for tickets caused so many problems.
Swift’s tour broke a Ticketmaster record by selling over 2 million tickets Nov. 15, the most ever sold for an artist in a single day.
Swift announced the Eras tour Nov. 1 with 27 dates across the United States. Since then she has added first 8 more dates on Nov. 4 and then 17 more on Nov. 11. The total 52 nights she has garnered since make Eras her biggest stadium tour yet.