The third time won’t be a charm for Swifties hoping to score tickets for Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour. Following record demand for tickets and widespread outrage over ticket buying issues, which include hours-long queue wait times and error messages, Ticketmaster announced Thursday that Friday’s general public sale for Swift’s The Era’s Tour has been canceled.
Ticketmaster devastated Swift’s fanbase with the news in a Thursday afternoon tweet, less than 24 hours before general public ticket sales were scheduled to open. In a statement, the company explained, “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 canceled.” Swift has not addressed the cancellation at this time.
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While sales were supposed to open to the general public at 10 a.m. local time Friday, Verified Fan presale began Tuesday, immediately proving to be “The Great War” for fans hoping to see the singer in concert. As presale opened, Ticketmaster crashed, with fans soon complaining of waiting in queue lines for hours before finally being let in to select tickets only to receive error messages and find sky-high prices, leaving many fans ticketless. Those issues continued on Wednesday, when the Capitol One presale began.
As outrage surrounding the fiasco grew, Ticketmaster on Thursday addressed the mishaps, explaining that more than 3.5 million fans pre-registered for Taylor’s Verified Fan program, the largest registration in Ticketmaster’s history. Of those, 2 million were sent to a waiting list and 1.5 million were given presale codes, a split the company said it decided on because “historically, around 40% of invited fans actually show up and buy tickets, and most purchase an average of 3 tickets.” However, when presale opened, “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.” Ticketmaster explained, “it usually takes us about an hour to sell through a stadium show, but we slowed down some sales and pushed back others to stabilize the systems. The trade off was longer wait times in queue for some fans.” According to Ticketmaster, over two million tickets were sold during the presale period, the most tickets ever sold for an artist in a single day.
“Even when a high demand on sale goes flawlessly from a tech perspective, many fans are left empty handed,” Ticketmaster said. “For example: 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.”
The upcoming tour was set to mark Swift’s first since her Reputation tour in 2017. Swift was set to embark on Lover Fest in promotion of her album Lover, but that tour was ultimately canceled amid the pandemic. The upcoming 52-date tour is “a journey through the musical eras of my career (past and present!),” Swift said when announcing The Eras Tour. Swift has released 10 studio albums, with Midnights, her most recent album, releasing last month.
