Ticketmaster has canceled the public ticket on-sale for Taylor Swift’s “The Eras Tour” that was set to take place Friday, Nov. 18. The company cited both “extraordinarily high demands on ticketing systems” and “insufficient remaining ticket inventory” as the reasons it was pulling the plug on the general sale.
The company posted on social media: “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.”
Ticketmaster’s decision to cancel the public on-sale follows a week of outrage involving “The Eras Tour.” The Verified Fan pre-sale that took place on Nov. 15 descended into chaos after Ticketmaster’s website crashed because of the fan demand, while tons of fans who did get into the queue had to wait for over two hours to get a chance at purchasing tickets. Other fans were sent to a waitlist.
Because of the Nov. 15 fiasco, the tour’s Capital One pre-sale originally scheduled for that day was delayed until Nov. 16. The general public sale was always set for Nov. 18 but has now been canceled.
A source close to the situation speculates that the tickets that were to go on sale Friday may end up going to people who experienced delays or problems earlier in the week, although that information is not confirmed. It remains unclear whether the general sale will be rescheduled.
Ticketmaster issued a lengthy explanation in the aftermath of the backlash, attempting to explain why its website crashed. The company said that “the staggering number of bot attacks” as well as fan demand “drove unprecedented traffic on our site, resulting in 3.5 billion total system requests — 4x our previous peak.”
“The Eras Tour” ended up breaking a Ticketmaster record as over two million tickets were sold on Nov. 15 for Swift’s shows, 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.”
From Variety US
