UPDATED, 9:27 AM: Taylor Swift has responded to Ticketmaster’s announcement Thursday that it is cancelling the public ticket sale for her Eras Tour amid overwhelming demand. “I’m not going to make excuses for anyone because we asked [Ticketmaster], multiple times, if they could handle this kind of demand and we were assured they could,” she wrote on Instagram. Here is her full statement:
“Well. It goes without saying that I’m extremely protective of my fans. We’ve been doing this for decades together and over the years, I’ve brought so many elements of my career in house. I’ve done this SPECIFICALLY to improve the quality of my fans’ experience by doing it myself with my team who care as much about my fans as I do. It’s really difficult for me to trust an outside entity with these relationships and loyalties, and excruciating for me to just watch mistakes happen with no recourse.
“There are a multitude of reasons why people had such a hard time trying to get tickets and I’m trying to figure out how this situation can be improved moving forward.
“I’m not going to make excuses for anyone because we asked them, multiple times, if they could handle this kind of demand and we were assured they could. It’s truly amazing that 2.4 million people got tickets, but it really pisses me off that a lot of them feel like they went through several bear attacks to get them.
“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.”
PREVIOUSLY, November 17: After presales for Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour crashed the Ticketmaster site on Wednesday, the company announced that tomorrow’s planned public on-sale window was being cancelled. It is unclear whether another public on-sale window will be announced for the tour or not, but given that the ticketing giant cited “extraordinarily high demands on ticketing systems and insufficient remaining ticket inventory to meet that demand,” that looks unlikely.
Wednesday’s issues sparked outrage among fans, with some waiting hours, some being logged off the site automatically and others likening it to the Hunger Games. Today’s announcement was quickly met with fury from Swifties as well.
Within minutes of the 12 p.m. PT announcement, fans expressed disbelief that Ticketmaster continued to fail at its one key duty: To sell tickets. Especially given all the extra fees the company charges.
Others offered a modest proposal: Claw back all the tickets now for sale online by scalpers for “$11,000-$50,000” and use them to fill the general onsale demand from fans.
Overwhelming demand from the same fans who had rocketed 10 songs from Swift’s most recent release Midnights to the top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100 — a first-time feat in the chart’s history — is likely one of the contributing issues.
In response to Wednesday’s issues, Rep. Alexandra Oscasio-Cortez wrote on Twitter, “Daily reminder that Ticketmaster is a monopoly, it’s [sic] merger with LiveNation should never have been approved, and they need to be reigned in. Break them up.”
She weighed in again today shortly after Ticketmaster’s annoucnement.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar, the chair of the Senate antitrust subcommittee, fired off a letter earlier today to Ticketmaster on Thursday amid concerns that the outages on its site for Taylor Swift concerts reflect a lack of competition in the business.
The letter to Live Nation Entertainment CEO Michael Rapino saw Klobuchar writing that she had “serious concerns about the state of competition in the ticketing industry and its harmful impact on consumers. Reports about system failures, increasing fees, and complaints of conduct that violate the consent decree Ticketmaster is under suggest that Ticketmaster continues to abuse its market positions.”
Klobuchar has been a critic of the concert ticket market, and argued that Ticketmaster’s “power in the primary ticket market insulates it from the competitive pressures that typically push companies to innovate and improve their services. That can result in the types of dramatic service failures we saw this week, where consumers are the ones that pay the price.”
Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal also weighed in on Wednesday.
A Ticketmaster spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
But Greg Maffei, the CEO of Liberty Media, the largest shareholder in Live Nation, told CNBC on Thursday that the overload was “a function of Taylor Swift. The site was supposed to open up for 1.5 million verified Taylor Swift fans. We had 14 million people hit the site, including bots, which are not supposed to be there.”
“Despite all the challenges and the breakdowns, we did sell over 2 million tickets that day,” reported Maffei. “We could’ve filled 900 stadiums.”
He added, “Though AOC may not like every element of our business, interestingly, AEG, our competitor, who is the promoter for Taylor Swift, chose to use us because, in reality, we are the largest and most effective ticket seller in the world.”
It’s not the only time in the past year that fans have complained about outages on the site. Last December, Adele fans trying to secure seats via a presale for her tour encountered glitches. Ticketmaster, at the time, said it was the result of an Amazon Web Services outage.
Jill Goldsmith contributed to this report.
