After the online ticketing service had to cancel the general sales for Taylor Swift's upcoming Eras Tour, Ticketmaster on Friday issued an apology to the Grammy Award winner, 32, and her throngs of fans, along with a lengthy explanation.
"We strive to make ticket buying as easy as possible for fans, but that hasn't been the case for many people trying to buy tickets for Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour," Ticketmaster prefaced in the statement. "First, we want to apologize to Taylor and all of her fans — especially those who had a terrible experience trying to purchase tickets."
"Next, we feel we owe it to everyone to share some information to help explain what happened," the statement continued.
Ticketmaster explained their Verified Fan registration process, which is intended to help manage high-demand sales and weed out bots.
The tweet was deleted after receiving backlash from audience.
The company noted that more than 3.5 million people pre-registered for the TaylorSwiftTix Presale powered by Verified Fan, which was its largest registration in history. The Tuesday sale also broke Ticketmaster's record for most tickets sold for an artist in a single day, selling two million tickets.
The company sent codes to 1.5 million users to join the sale for all 52 tour dates. The two million remaining users were placed on a waiting list in case any tickets remained available.
Ticketmaster said that around 15% of users experienced issues, some of whom lost tickets they had carted. They blamed the "unprecedented traffic" on a "staggering number of bot attacks as well as fans who didn't have codes," with 3.5 billion total system requests, four times higher than its previous peak.
"The biggest venues and artists turn to us because we have the leading ticketing technology in the world — that doesn't mean it's perfect, and clearly for Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour on-sale, it wasn't," the statement read. "But we're always working to improve the ticket-buying experience. Especially for high-demand on-sales, which continue to test new limits."
"We're working to shore up our tech for the new bar that has been set by demand for the Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour," Ticketmaster added.
Ticketmaster previously canceled a planned general sale for the Eras Tour "due to extraordinarily high demands on ticketing systems and insufficient remaining ticket inventory to meet that demand," after two million tickets were sold during the Verified Fan presale.
Swift has since called out Ticketmaster, although she didn't directly name the company in a statement that said that the chaotic presale "really pisses me off."
"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," Swift wrote on her Instagram Story. "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."
Meanwhile, the U.S. Justice Department has launched an antitrust investigation into Ticketmaster's parent company Live Nation Entertainment, according to The New York Times.
After dropping her 10th studio album Midnights last month and confirming that a tour was happening "sometime soonish," Swift has announced her Eras Tour and 20 stops on the U.S. leg, kicking off March 17, 2023, in Glendale, Ariz.
Swift's Eras Tour has since been a subject of chatter for the likes of Haim, Bruce Springsteen and even Swift's ex Joe Jonas, who joked about buying tickets for wife Sophie Turner.
