Taylor Swift fans looking to buy tickets for her upcoming tour might be out of luck after Ticketmaster announced that it had canceled Friday’s public ticket sales due to an extraordinary demand and insufficient tickets to meet that demand.
The announcement came after a presale fiasco that saw millions of fans flock to the website, causing website outages and long waits for ticket purchases.
On Thursday, November 17, Ticketmaster posted a statement on Twitter saying that there was an extremely high demand for the tickets and that they did not have enough tickets to supply that demand.
The announcement came just 24 hours after the Tennessee Attorney General’s Office said it would investigate whether Ticketmaster violated consumer protection laws in its ticket sale handling.
Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti said his office wanted to ensure that Ticketmaster had not done anything to merit a legal response. Speaking at a press conference on Wednesday, Skrmetti said his office had received several complaints about the issue and that he had identified one other state interested in filing a lawsuit against the company.
After the troubles on Ticketmaster’s website left many potential buyers unable to get tickets, people who had successfully bought the Era’s Tour tickets took to the internet to resell the tickets at insanely high prices reaching a thousand dollars per ticket.
Ticketmaster said that the website started seeing massive traffic on Tuesday as millions of people gained access to the website and tried to buy the tickets, which created an unprecedented demand, crashing its website.
The ticket company, owned by Live Nation Entertainment, said in a Thursday statement that the website experienced a staggering number of bot attacks and millions of fans who did not have presale codes, which drove up traffic to the website.
The overwhelming demand for tickets to Taylor Swift’s tour comes from the release of her new album, ‘Midnights,’ which has experienced huge commercial success and has broken numerous records worldwide. The fact that the singer has not had a stadium tour since 2018 is also a huge factor.
According to Skrmetti, Ticketmaster’s near monopoly on ticketing has made the company too comfortable. He said that the vast market share the company enjoys poses a significant risk to the industry and that the lack of competition would drive up prices while reducing the quality of their service.
Skrmetti said that his office is investigating the presale codes that the company gave to fans, what they promised them, and if they delivered on their promises. His office will also look into complaints they received about the lack of customer support. They will also investigate the company’s ability to sell tickets directly to customers and ease ticket resales.
Senator Amy Klobuchar also took to Twitter on Wednesday, addressing Michael Rapino, Live Nation Entertainment’s President and CEO, saying that Ticketmaster was abusing its strong market position.
Taylor Swift’s Era’s Tour is scheduled to start in Glendale, Arizona, on March 17, 2023.