Taylor Swift Says Ticketmaster Was ‘Excruciating for Me’ After Disaster Eras Tour Launch

Taylor Swift has spoken out after fans online experienced some of the longest lines to purchase tickets for her tour “Eras”.

In an Instagram post online Swift wrote, “It goes without saying that I’m extremely protective of my fans. “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.”

The artist blamed Ticketmaster for the lack of support from the sales giant when her pre-sale tickets went live.

“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,” the singer wrote. “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.”

In addition, the singer stated she would “figure out how this situation can be improved moving forward.”

Sales for the tickets went on sale Tuesday but the demand on the site caused not only issues for fans but for the Ticketmaster site overall. Representatives from the sales platform stated they sold over two million tickets, which could fill over nine hundred stadiums.

Yet, the rest of the sale had been canceled due to “extraordinarily high demands on ticketing systems and insufficient remaining ticket inventory to meet that demand.”

“To those who didn’t get tickets, all I can say is that my hope is to provide more opportunities for us to get together and sing these songs,” Swift added.

How Many People Were Actually on the Ticketmaster Site?

The main issue started for the platform when sales for “verified fans” started. This feature of Ticketmaster, which launched in 2017, was to eliminate bots and fraudulent activity on the site by giving out presale codes to designated cardholders and individuals.

Yet, more than 3.5 million registered to be a “verified fan,” more than the platform has ever seen at once. According to Ticketmaster, this was the largest fan activity ever seen on record.

“Historically, working with ‘Verified Fan’ invite codes has worked as we’ve been able to manage the volume coming into the site to shop for tickets,” the company wrote on Thursday in a blog post that has since been taken down. “However, this time the staggering number of bot attacks as well as fans who didn’t have invite codes drove unprecedented traffic on our site.”

Ticketmaster also went on to say that it “usually takes us about an hour to sell through a stadium show,” something that they more than exceeded on the initial launch of “Eras”.

Capital One credit card holders were the first to experience this failure of the tour. Many of these users waiting over five hours in line for the platform bring up error codes and eventually take them out of their place in the queue.

Many fans blamed the site as the rest of the general public did not get a chance to purchase any tickets on Friday as initially planned.

Fans online have been more than concerned as resale for these tickets have been listed for tens of thousands of dollars.

What’s Next for Ticketmaster

Senator Amy Klobuchar wrote in a letter to the Ticketmaster CEO on Wednesday stating “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.”

Other figures online also went on to criticize the platform for its massive control on the music industry.

The Department of Justice has opened an antitrust investigation into Live Nation, parent company of Ticketmaster. The DOJ will be looking into how much of a threshold the company actually has over the landscape and for its artists they work with.

This all comes after Swift took over the top 10 spots on the Billboard Hot 100 for the first time ever in history. Tracks from Swift’s latest album dominated the spots as previously reported from What’s Trending, making Midnights one of the most anticipated and successful released of all time.

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