Taylor Swift fans trying to score tickets to the singer’s highly anticipated tour crashed the Ticketmaster website, with thousands reporting outages on the tracking site Downdetector.com on Nov 15 morning.
Ticketmaster Fan Support tweeted that West Coast dates originally scheduled to go on sale at 10am local time would instead be taking place at 3pm, with queues opening 30 minutes before.
“There has been unprecedented demand with millions showing up to buy tickets,” the company said in the tweet. “Hundreds of thousands of tickets have been sold.”
Ticketmaster told Bloomberg that demand was more than twice the number of tickets available. The artiste’s team chose to use the company’s verified fan system because it’s the best way to get tickets in the hands of actual fans, and not ticket-buying services.
Since Swift announced “The Eras Tour” earlier this month, it’s been something of a Hunger Games to land a ticket to one of her shows. Fans were asked to register on the Ticketmaster website for the chance to nab a presale code, and many received only a waitlist notification instead.
Within hours of going on sale on Nov 15, tickets starting populating the Gametime resale site with some priced as high as US$20,900 (RM94,913) each for the show at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California. Tickets for the general public go on sale this Friday, Nov 18, at 10am.
Complaints about the sales snafus prompted Democratic New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to tweet that the 2010 merger between Ticketmaster, a leader in ticket sales, and Live Nation Entertainment Inc, the largest concert promoter, shouldn’t have been allowed to happen. “Break them up,’’ she wrote.
As pandemic concerns wane and people continue to spend on premium in-person experiences, Live Nation is coming off its biggest summer concert season in history. Ticket prices and the difficulty buying seats has been a recurring focus of politicians responding to fan outrage, however. Earlier this year, sales of Bruce Springsteen tickets reached US$5,000 (RM22,706) a seat, prompting New Jersey Congressman Bill Pascrell, also a Democrat, to demand an explanation for the “exorbitant’’ markups.
A Ticketmaster spokesperson said that 18% of Springsteen’s tour tickets in the US sold for less than US$99 (RM449), while 1% of tickets sold for more than US$1,000 (RM4,541).
Live Nation didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment about Ocasio-Cortez’s tweet. Ticketmaster noted that Swift’s tour is promoted by AEG and Messina Touring Group, not Live Nation. Seat Geek is also selling tickets directly from the promoters.
Swift, who’s riding high following the release last month of her latest album, Midnights, has added more shows. Her tour kicks off March 17 in Glendale, Arizona, at State Farm Stadium and ends Aug 9 in Inglewood, California, at SoFi Stadium. – Bloomberg
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