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Swift’s 14 million requests overrun Ticketmaster
At this point, Taylor Swift would be well-advised to add yet more dates on “The Eras” tour. Demand for the current shows has forced Ticketmaster to sell out even before tickets were to go on public sale Friday morning.
The ticket company announced via Twitter on Thursday it was canceling the public onsale to Swift’s shows, including the March 24-25 dates at Allegiant Stadium.
“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 | The Eras Tour has been cancelled,” Ticketmaster posted.
According to the company, the demand through its Verified Fan Presale system was so high, all tickets were booked before being offered to the general public.
Fans have been complaining of the Ticketmaster system throughout Swift’s onsale. The company’s system could not meet the Verified Fan pre-sale, starting Tuesday, with the start times in Las Vegas and across the Pacific time zone pushed back from 10 a.m.-3 p.m. Fans reported two-hour waits just for a chance to buy tickets, or be shifted to a waitlist and left there with no updates until today’s announcement.
Swfities were once more flaying Ticketmaster on social media.
“Uhhh…so for people who didn’t get tickets, there are no tickets for them?!??” said @_estherhanna_
“bro what that’s so unfair for everyone who didn’t get presale,” said @itsn1kki.
“If you were going to put everything on sale before the general sale why not cancel the general sale from the start” said enchanted_dj
Respected veterain music journalist Bob Lefsetz said the entire episode is rooted in the market succumbing to high demand.
“Yes, this was a learning experience for Ticketmaster. They will have to upgrade their underlying software in order to make sure this does not happen again. Maybe it’s a matter of employing additional servers too. This is unheard of? Even Spotify has outages once and again. Oops, that’s another monopoly, in this case hurting all the artists, right?
“So you couldn’t get front row seats to Taylor Swift at face value. You can’t even buy a Rolex at face value anymore, what’s out there has been peeled off by independent distributors. They call it the market. And demand exceeded supply, that’s it.”
The head of tour promoter Live Nation’s largest shareholder said the company said several million more fans than expected tried to buy Swift tickets. Live Nation merged with Ticketmaster in 2010.
“It’s a function of Taylor Swift. The site was supposed to open up for 1.5 million verified Taylor Swift fans,” Liberty Media CEO Greg Maffei said on CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” Thursday. “We had 14 million people hit the site, including bots, which are not supposed to be there.”
“The bots” are automated systems used by disreputable ticket brokers circumventing companies’ efforts to sell tickets directly to fans. The BOTS Act, enacted in 2016, is designed to prevent brokers using these “access controls” from buying large numbers of tickets and reselling them at inflated prices.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y. tweeted Tuesday that the Live Nation and Ticketmaster should be broken up, to avoid outsized control of the live-entertainment market.
But Maffei said, “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. Even our competitors want to come on our platform.”
John Katsilometes’ column runs daily in the A section. His “PodKats!” podcast can be found at reviewjournal.com/podcasts. Contact him at jkatsilometes@reviewjournal.com. Follow @johnnykats on Twitter, @JohnnyKats1 on Instagram.