Ticketmaster cancels Taylor Swift ticket sales

(NewsNation) — Ticketmaster has canceled plans to launch public ticket sales to Taylor Swift’s upcoming tour, citing “extraordinarily high demands” and too few tickets.

Tuesday’s ticket sales for Taylor Swift’s The Eras tour were only supposed to be available to people with a specific presale code, but Ticketmaster says bots and others without a code logged on anyway.

Now the platform is faced with unprecedented demand and frustration from eager Swift fans.

Tickets were supposed to be available to the public Wednesday.

According to Ticketmaster, millions of fans flooded the website and waited hours for tickets to Swift’s highly anticipated 2023 tour. The site received 3.5 billion system requests on Tuesday and a “staggering” number of bot attacks, according to a news release.

“On one hand, it’s easy to vilify Ticketmaster,” said Dean Budnick, editor of Relix Magazine and co-author of “Tick Masters: The Rise of the Concert Industry and How the Public Got Scalped. “I don’t want to absolve them but on the other hand, it’s complex. … There’s so many people out there that want to see Taylor perform on this tour, and on top of that, there are so many people who want to buy tickets so they can resell them.”

Some resale tickets for one of Swift’s Chicago shows next year have been listed for $1,000.

Ticketmaster, however, claims there are 90% fewer resale tickets on the market right now than normal.

The issues this week prompted criticism of Ticketmaster’s recent merger with Live Nation. Critics have argued the ticketing website has a monopoly on the market.

Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti announced this week that his office is looking into a number of complaints from Swift fans.

“If we’re seeing a situation where people are trying to use a service and they’re not getting the product that they paid for, the product that they were promised, that could be an indicator that there’s not enough competition in the market,” Skrmetti said.