Taylor Swift is speaking out against Ticketmaster after fans experienced problems buying tickets to her upcoming Eras tour.
Ticketmaster experienced errors and site slowdowns on Tuesday during its Taylor Swift presale for verified fans. The site sold 2 million tickets during the presale, a record for a single artist in a day, but continued to experience technical issues with its Capital One sale Wednesday due to high demand. Ticketmaster then canceled the general sale Friday “due to extraordinarily high demands on ticketing systems and insufficient remaining ticket inventory to meet that demand.”
“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,” Swift wrote on Instagram. “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.”
“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,” Swift added.
The pop star said she and her team are “trying to figure out how this situation can be improved moving forward” and that she hopes to find “more opportunities” for the fans who did not get tickets.
Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino said Thursday that 3.5 million fans registered to be verified fans and 1.5 million were selected to buy tickets during the presale. However, the site was overwhelmed with requests to buy tickets from verified fans, bots and others looking to buy tickets.
“We invited a million and a half on that day to come and buy those tickets, but it’s kind of like having a party. Everybody crashed that door at the same time with 3.5 billion requests,” Rapino said. Speaking Thursday morning, Rapino said the site “did manage to recover” despite slowdowns.
The lack of ticket availability and the site glitches led several lawmakers, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Amy Klobuchar to question the merger of Live Nation and Ticketmaster and its handling of ticket operations.