By Kalhan Rosenblatt -
NBC News
Ticketmaster announced via Twitter on Thursday that it had canceled the public sale of tickets for
singer Taylor Swift's
The Eras tour.
“Due to extraordinarily high demand on ticketing systems and insufficient inventory to meet it, tomorrow's public sale for Taylor Swift |
The Eras Tour
has been cancelled," Ticketmaster wrote in the tweet.
The news comes after a frustrating race for pre-sale tickets.
Ticket seekers for the concert had to wait for hours and the website would sometimes crash, returning them to the front of a virtual queue with thousands of people ahead.
Swift recently added 17 dates to her 2023 US tour, which kicks off in Arizona in March and ends in Los Angeles in August.
The tour will consist of 52 concerts.
Swift's representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Taylor Swift accepts an award onstage during the 2022 MTV Europe Music Awards held at the PSD Bank Dome on November 13, 2022 in Düsseldorf, Germany.
Getty Images
In a full statement, Ticketmaster explained that pre-sales broke records on the site and acknowledged that it had not delivered the ticket-buying experience he had hoped for.
"We strive to make buying tickets as easy as possible for fans, but that hasn't been the case for many people trying to buy
The Eras Tour
tickets ," the statement said.
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Ticketmaster explained that more than 3.5 million people pre-registered for the sale to verified fans of the singer, the most in the site's history.
However, the portal assured that, normally, 40% of the fans invited to buy tickets actually do so and buy an average of three tickets.
This means that 1.5 million fans were invited to buy tickets, while the remaining 2.5 million were on the waiting list.
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On social media, fans expressed their dismay to learn that the public sale had been cancelled.
"I'm going to jump in front of traffic," one person tweeted.
Another wrote: “Is it going to be rescheduled?
what's going on?
more info would be great”
“How is it possible that all the pre-sale tickets are sold out when only 15% are supposed to be on sale?” asked one person.
Some have pointed to the exorbitant resale prices for pre-sale tickets, some running into the tens of thousands of dollars.
Resale prices and issues with Ticketmaster have led to increased scrutiny of the platform and its parent company, Live Nation Entertainment.
Several lawmakers sent a letter to Michael Rapino, Chairman and CEO of Live Nation Entertainment Inc., expressing “their grave concerns about the state of competition in the ticketing industry and its detrimental impact on consumers.” ”.
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In the letter, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minnesota, who chairs a subcommittee on antitrust issues, wrote that Ticketmaster is not subject to competition, which means it is not required to innovate or create a better service for consumers.
In the letter, Klobuchar asked Rapino to answer a series of questions, including how much the company has spent on upgrading technology to cope with increased demand and what percentage of high-end tour tickets are booked. for presale.
The chaotic display of tickets also caught the attention of Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti, who said he would investigate Ticketmaster.
"If it's a consumer protection violation and we can find exactly where the problems are, we can get a court order forcing the company to do better," Skrmetti added at a news conference on Wednesday.