Ticketmaster took to social media on Friday night (November 18) to apologize to Taylor Swift and her fans for the messy ticket sales for her 2023 The Eras tour and shared a statement on what happened.
In the past, there had always been problems purchasing tickets through the provider, including in Germany, recently, for example, with Depeche Mode ticket sales.
The Ticketmaster statement on social media
Taking to Twitter, the ticket provider humbly shared a link detailing the incident, saying: “We want to apologize to Taylor and all of her fans – especially those who had a horrible experience trying to get tickets to buy. We feel we owe it to each person to share some information to explain what happened.”
We want to apologize to Taylor and all of her fans – especially those who had a terrible experience trying to purchase tickets. We feel we owe it to everyone to share some information to help explain what happened: https://t.co/1Gn4kRIvq8
— Ticketmaster (@Ticketmaster) November 19, 2022
The debacle stemmed from Swift’s pre-sale for her 52-day The Eras tour. 14 million fans and billions of bots flooded the site, causing service disruptions and many annoyed fans without tickets.
This is how Ticketmaster explains the failure of their website
In Friday’s statement, which repeated much of what was written (and later deleted) in a previous blog post, Ticketmaster noted that more than 3.5 million fans signed up for Swift’s “Verified Fan Program.” “Never before has a ‘Verified Fan Onsale’ attracted so much attention — or so much traffic,” the company wrote. “This has disrupted the predictability and reliability that is the hallmark of our ‘Verified Fan Platform.'”
Typically, the “Verified Program” is designed to find bots, reduce wait times, and make sales smoother. Fans who are lucky enough to receive a “verified code” in advance can enter it when booking, giving them a better chance of getting tickets. When Swift presold, approximately 1.5 million people were given codes to take part in the presale for all 52 show dates, including the 47 sold by Ticketmaster. According to Ticketmaster, all two million tickets for the “Verified Fan Presale” were also sold to “Verified Fans”. The remaining nearly two million verified fans were placed on a waiting list with the slim chance that tickets would still be available after the recipients of the codes made a purchase.
In addition to the verified fans, at the same time – according to reports – almost ten million other fans tried to access the website, which the provider claims to have collapsed.
The disaster also had something positive: A new Ticketmaster record
According to Ticketmaster, fans broke the daily record with two million tickets sold on Tuesday (November 15), purchasing more than 90 percent of the total tickets on Tuesday and Wednesday. Ticketmaster added on Friday: “We are working to strengthen our technology for the new bar set by the demand for The Eras tour. When we have managed to do that and there are further steps, we will inform you accordingly.”
Swift via Ticketmaster
Swift wrote on an Instagram Story after the incident: “I will not apologize to anyone as we have asked them numerous times if they can handle this type of demand and have been assured they can. It’s really amazing that 2.4 million people got tickets, but it pisses me off that many of them feel like they had to go through multiple bear attacks to get tickets.”