Ticketmaster Finally Apologized To Swifties & Explained Why The Eras Sale Went So Wrong
Finally, some answers.
Swifties broke Ticketmaster when the ticket vendor site crashed during Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour presale on Nov. 15, leaving millions waiting in a virtual queue, and now, the vendor is finally offering an apology as well as an explanation of what happened. If you’ve been following the fiasco, you know there were a number of things that went wrong, and this was not the “Glitch” fans were looking for. Swift broke her silence three days following the crash and said she was “pissed” about how the sales went down. Now, Ticketmaster is finally owning up to its mistakes in a lengthy explanation shared to Twitter on Nov. 18. Here’s their apology and explanation for what caused the Eras Tour ticketing wreck.
In a statement on Ticketmaster’s Business site, the company wrote, “We want to apologize to Taylor and all of her fans — especially those who had a terrible experience trying to purchase tickets.” A breakdown of sales data showed a record number of fans visiting the site. According to Ticketmaster, “over 3.5 million people pre-registered for TaylorSwiftTix Presale powered by Verified Fan, which is the largest registration in history.” Out of those 3.5 million, “around 1.5 million were sent codes to join the onsale” and “the remaining 2 million Verified Fans were placed on a waiting list on the small chance that tickets might still be available after those who received codes had shopped.”
One can’t help but wonder, if pre-registration broke records, that would mean Ticketmaster was fully aware of the unusually high demand prior to Nov. 15 and could’ve, in theory, taken additional measurements to avoid the system overload. The platform blamed a “staggering number of bot attacks as well as fans who didn’t have codes” for the “unprecedented traffic.” The site apparently received “3.5 billion total system requests,” per the statement.
Previously, in a Nov. 17 interview with CNBC, Liberty Media CEO Greg Maffei said, “We had 14 million people hit the site, including bots, which are not supposed to be there.” Liberty Media is Live Nation Entertainment’s largest shareholder, and Live Nation Entertainment has been the parent company of Ticketmaster since their 2010 merger. On Nov. 18, The New York Times reported the Justice Department has now opened an investigation into whether Live Nation abused its monopoly power over the multibillion-dollar live music industry. As Swift’s song goes, “This is why we can't have nice things, darling.”
Swift and her team seemed to have anticipated the overwhelming demand, possibly because the Eras Tour is the singer’s first since her 2018 Reputation Stadium Tour. Swift’s LP Midnights also made history in the charts when tracks from the album made up the entirety of Billboard’s Hot 100 top ten songs the week after its release. “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 in a Nov. 18 Instagram story.
If you were one of 2.4 million lucky fans to snag tickets, I don’t know how you did it, but you won. CNN reported ticket resales on Stubhub were listed for as much as $21,600 per ticket. With general ticket sales canceled, getting your hands on a T-Swift concert ticket seems less likely than winning the lottery. If you need me, I’ll be taking the “Anti-Hero” lyrics “I wake up screaming from dreaming” quite literally.
