In case you missed it, the millions of people trying to get tickets for Taylor Swift’s upcoming The Eras Tour basically put Ticketmaster into meltdown mode earlier this week.
As The Verge reports, fans lucky enough to get presale codes encountered continuously crashing queues, massive wait times, and systems that wouldn’t accept their information (such as the aforementioned codes, login, and payment info). As for those who planned on waiting for the general sale, it turns out they’re out of luck; Ticketmaster announced that was canceled on Thursday “due to extraordinarily high demands on ticketing systems and insufficient remaining ticket inventory.”
In response, the artist didn’t mince words when talking about her fans’ experiences with Ticketmaster, saying that “it really pisses me off” what people had to go through to get tickets. She also thanks her fans for wanting to come to her shows, saying they “have no idea how much that means.”
Ultimately, Swift’s statement hits similar notes to Ticketmaster’s in terms of what’s actually being done; she says she’s happy 2.4 million people got tickets but sorry that many of them “feel like they went through several bear attacks to get them.” She also says she hopes people who didn’t get tickets will have “more opportunities” to go to one of her concerts and that the situation will be better in the future.
For its part, the company mainly tried to deflect blame, saying that the demand for tickets after years without a Taylor Swift concert was totally unpredictable (a sentiment the CEO of a major stakeholder in Ticketmaster’s parent company later repeated to CNBC). Ticketmaster also said it would try to do better in an explainer that has now seemingly been yanked from its site. The company didn’t immediately respond to The Verge’s request for comment on what happened to its post.
Swift does try to make it clear that she’s pretty unhappy with how everything went down, talking about how she’s had her team handle “so many elements” of her career instead of outsourcing them and how it’s hard for her to trust an external company like Ticketmaster with such a vital part of the Swiftie-Swift relationship. It also sounds like Swift knew Ticketmaster might have been trouble when it walked in. According to her statement, her team asked Ticketmaster “multiple times” if it could handle the traffic and was reassured that it could.
Here’s Swift’s whole statement:
Well. It goes without saying that l’m extremely protective of my fans. We’ve been doing this for decades together and over the years, I’ve brought so many elements of my career in house. I’ve done this SPECIFICALLY to improve the quality of my fans’ experience by doing it myself with my team who care as much about my fans as I do. It’s really difficult for me to trust an outside entity with these relationships and loyalties, and excruciating for me to just watch mistakes happen with no recourse.
There are a multitude of reasons why people had such a hard time trying to get tickets and I’m trying to figure out how this situation can be improved moving forward. 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. 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.
And to those who didn’t get tickets, all I can say is that my hope is to provide more opportunities for us to all get together and sing these songs. Thank you for wanting to be there. You have no idea how much that means.
While Swift hints that it seems unlikely that tickets for her next tour will be sold via Ticketmaster, the Ticketmaster / Live Nation conglomerate has an iron grip on the live events industry, and it’s doubtful that many venues would even be allowed to make deals with Swift independently.
But now there’s a new wrench thrown in: it appears that the Department of Justice has been paying attention to the whole debacle. According to The Verge, the government has reportedly opened an antitrust investigation into Live Nation after several lawmakers raised concerns about it being a monopoly and whether there was enough competition in the ticket-selling space.
Ticketmaster has long been accused of being anticompetitive. As The Los Angeles Times reported, Pearl Jam filed a complaint about it to the DOJ in 1994. So it remains to be seen whether this incident will be the latest in a series of unsuccessful attempts to loosen the company’s iron grip on the industry or if it’ll be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.
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