Ticketmaster Suspends Taylor Swift Ticket Sale

UPDATE Nov 17, 2022 4:40 PM CST

The mess that is the Ticketmaster selling of tickets for Taylor Swift's next tour has been paused: The vendor called off the general sale scheduled for Friday. In a tweet Thursday afternoon, Variety reports, Ticketmaster blamed "extraordinarily high demands on ticketing systems and insufficient remaining ticket inventory" for the cancellation. Not mentioned is the fact that the presale on Tuesday was a disaster. A new date for the public sale was not released. In a statement, per NBC News, Ticketmaster said that even if the sale were to go smoothly, not everyone who wants a ticket would be able to buy one, saying, "based on the volume of traffic to our site, Taylor would need to perform over 900 stadium shows" to meet ticket demand. Swift has committed to 52 concerts, starting in March.

Nov 15, 2022 3:17 PM CST

Twitter was a hotbed of ire on Tuesday, with much of it directed at Ticketmaster. The first tickets for Taylor Swift's Eras Tour went on sale at 10am ET, and to say that things haven't been going well would be the understatement of the year. Only previously "Verified Fans" were given access to the first round of tickets—by Ticketmaster itself, which sent email confirmations Monday night and unique codes Tuesday morning—meaning Ticketmaster in theory had some controls in place in terms of limits on the number of people who could theoretically get in line. But it couldn't handle it, with approved buyers experiencing a crashing website and/or finding themselves unable to enter the ticket waiting room, join the queue, or purchase the tickets they were eventually able to select, the Verge reports. Some reaction:

• As one person tweeted, "Dear Ticketmaster," followed by an image reading, "Our expectations were low but holy f---."
• "It’s honestly impressive how ticketmaster has single handedly monopolized the live event industry for YEARS and yet they still can’t run a functioning website," observed another person.
• "How can they blame unprecedented demand when they literally issued the presale codes. they royally fumbled the bag," noted another in reference to a tweet from Ticketmaster itself that cited that "historically unprecedented demand" and pushed back the timing of West Coast ticket sales as well as a schedule presale for Capital One card holders.
• Echoing that: "ticketmaster be like 'the demand is unprecedented" as if they didn’t have a complete list of the first and last name email address and phone number of every single person who wanted a ticket. there has never been a more precedented demand."
• Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez joined the action, tweeting, "Daily reminder that Ticketmaster is a monopoly, it’s merger with LiveNation should never have been approved, and they need to be reigned in. Break them up." That led to this observation: "You know Ticketmaster is the most loathed institution in this country when every reply under an AOC tweet is positive."

(More Taylor Swift stories.)