Ticketmaster has jumped the hopes and ruined the Christmas of millions of Taylor Swift fans still hoping to get tickets to The Eras Tour with the announcement that tomorrow’s general sale has been cancelled.
In a tweet on Thursday, Ticketmaster warned fans that “due to extraordinarily high demands on ticketing systems and insufficient remaining ticket inventory to meet that demand, tomorrow’s public sale for Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour has been cancelled.”
Representatives from Live Nation and Ticketmaster did not immediately respond Rolling stone‘s request for comment. It’s unclear what will happen to the remaining unsold tickets — if any, after the Verified Fans and Capitol One presale — or if the general presale will be rescheduled.
On the official Ticketmaster site, the company tried to explain the ticket-buying debacle that saw millions of fans waitlisted for the Verified Fan pre-sale, even excluding those who did get pre-sale codes due to the whack-a-mole nature of securing tickets.
“Historically, working with Verified Fan invite codes has worked because we were able to control the volume coming into the site to buy tickets,” Ticketmaster wrote. “This time, however, the staggering number of bot attacks and fans not having invite codes drove unprecedented traffic to our site, resulting in 3.5 billion total system requests – 4x our previous peak.”
The statement also included the outrageous claim that in order for Swift to adequately meet fan demand, “Taylor would have to do more than 900 stadium shows (nearly 20x the number of shows she does) … that’s a stadium show every night for the next 2.5 years.”
Until there is clarity on the fate of the remaining tickets, fans may still be gutted in the secondary market. However, as Ticketmaster points out, “There are currently 90% fewer tickets being offered for resale on secondary markets than a normal sale,” driving prices up to astronomical levels.
All of this comes just hours after Live Nation Entertainment chairman Greg Maffei attempted to shift the blame for the Ticketmaster mess back to Swift. In an interview on Thursday, he claimed that the fault is not with Live Nation or Ticketmaster, but with the incomprehensible demand for tickets. The singer, he suggested, is just too famous.
“The Live Nation team is sympathetic to the long wait times and fans who couldn’t get what they wanted,” Maffei told CNBC. “The reality is it’s a function of the huge demand that Taylor Swift has. The site would be opened to 1.5 million verified Taylor Swift fans. We had 14 million people on the site – including bots, another story, which shouldn’t be there. And despite all the challenges and glitches, we sold over 2 million tickets that day. We could have filled 900 stadiums.”
