Ticketmaster seems to really be doing their best to get everybody to dislike them. This past Tuesday, the ticketing giant’s servers were flooded with millions of Taylor Swift fans (and bots) who were attempting to purchase pre-sale tickets for Swift’s The Eras Tour. Ticketmaster grossly underestimated the demand for the stadium concert tour and the servers frequently crashed, booting users who were in the queue and worst of all, denying them the ability to purchase tickets to see Taylor Swift in concert. Fans were up in arms and even congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez sounded the alarm.
Now the situation has gotten even worse. It seems as though there was so much demand for these pre-sales and priority access sales, that Ticketmaster has made the decision to cancel the general public on-sale window that was set to begin tomorrow altogether. “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 canceled,” read a cut-and-dry tweet from the official Ticketmaster Twitter account.
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 (@Ticketmaster) November 17, 2022
“Reality is, it’s a function of the massive demand that Taylor Swift has,” Live Nation chairman Greg Maffei said earlier in a feeble attempt to explain how the Live Nation-owned Ticketmaster platform had failed to account for the supply and demand of the very industry that they appear to dominate (and nearly monopolize). “The site was supposed to be opened up for 1.5 million verified Taylor Swift fans. We had 14 million people hit the site, including bots — another story — which are not supposed to be there.”
So it seems as though there were so many pre-sale purchases, there was likely not even a need for a public on-sale to begin with. Business and political implications aside, the cancellation of the public on-sale leaves countless Taylor Swift fans out in the cold. This is not how fair market ticketing is supposed to work.