Ticketmaster apparently sold all the tickets to the West Coast leg of Taylor Swift’s upcoming “The Eras Tour” before they ever went on sale to the public. Its public on-sale, set for 10 a.m. Friday, Nov. 18, was canceled the day before.
“Due to extraordinarily high demands on ticketing systems and insufficient remaining ticket inventory to meet that demand, tomorrow’s public on-sale … has been cancelled,” Ticketmaster tweeted Thursday.
All the Taylor Swift tickets are gone. (Image: hellogiggles.com)
Swift’s tour includes performances at the 65,000-seat Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas on Friday, March 24, and Saturday, March 25. These will be her first full, non-festival sets in town since May 23, 2009. (That’s when she performed at the Mandalay Bay Event Center – now the Michelob Ultra Arena – as part of her “Fearless” tour.)
I Knew You Were Trouble
This is the first time in the California-based ticket distributor’s 47-year history that it has canceled a previously announced public on-sale because of lack of inventory.
According to Greg Maffei, CEO of Liberty Media, Ticketmaster’s largest shareholder, 1.5 million verified Taylor Swift fans were supposed to be able to purchase tickets during the presale, which began Tuesday. They were emailed exclusive codes to do so.
However, the site received 14 million purchase requests with the correct codes. Many of those came from bots, Maffie told CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street,” referring to autonomous programs designed to complete internet transactions.
Maffei defended Ticketmaster, saying the company successfully sold more than 2 million tickets on Tuesday, but that demand for Swift “could have filled 900 stadiums.”
Swift Backlash
On Thursday, Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti announced he was launching an investigation into Ticketmaster because of the amount of complaints made to his office by customers throughout the Swift pre-sales.
“He and his Consumer Protection team will use every available tool to ensure that no consumer protection laws were violated,” his office tweeted.
When many verified Swifties entered the Ticketmaster pre-sale and tried their codes, they reported that they did not work.
“I had tickets in my cart and was kicked to the back of the queue,” one tweeted, tagging @TMFanSupport. “I am so upset.”
Another fan tweeted: “I went through the queue after 3 hours and it gave me an error when it was my turn. How is that fair?”
So many fans sat in the Ticketmaster queue on Tuesday, waiting for hours for their chance to purchase Swift tickets, that the site locked up and paused. Trying to buy itself time, the ticket distributor then delayed the start of the pre-sale for five hours while it figured out what had happened and how to best handle the situation.
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