Ticketmaster has issued a formal apology to Taylor Swift and her fans following the chaotic ticket sales process for her 2023 Eras Tour.
The ticketing giant took to social media on Friday night (Nov. 18) to share a brief apology message, along with a link to a lengthier explanation on its website about why legions of Swifties weren’t able to buy tickets.
“We want to apologize to Taylor and all of her fans — especially those who had a terrible experience trying to purchase tickets,” Ticketmaster tweeted. “We feel we owe it to everyone to share some information to help explain what happened.”
The debacle stems from Swift’s presale earlier this week for her 52-date Eras Tour, which initially crashed shortly after launch as 14 million fans and billions of bots flooded the site, causing service disruptions.
In its Friday 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 pre-registered for Swift’s Verified Fan program.
“Never before has a Verified Fan onsale sparked so much attention — or traffic,” the company wrote. “This disrupted the predictability and reliability that is the hallmark of our Verified Fan platform.”
Fans bought up more than 90% of the ticketing inventory on Tuesday and Wednesday, according to Ticketmaster, breaking the record on Tuesday for the most tickets ever sold in a single day by a touring artist at 2 million.
Ticketmaster added on Friday, “We’re working to shore up our tech for the new bar that has been set by demand for the Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour. Once we get through that, if there are any next steps, updates will be shared accordingly.”
Earlier in the day, Swift spoke out against Ticketmaster for her fans’ problematic experience in purchasing tickets to her tour.
“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,” the superstar wrote on her Instagram Story. “It’s truly amazing that 2.4 million people got tickets, but it really pisses me off that lot of them feel like they went through several bear attacks to get them.”
Sen. Amy Klobuchar sent an open letter on Thursday to Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino detailing her “concerns about the state of competition in the ticketing industry and its harmful impact on consumers.” The problem, wrote Klobuchar, is a lack of competition “that typically push[es] companies to innovate and improve their services. That can result in dramatic service failures, where consumers are the ones that pay the price.”
On Friday, a New York Times report surfaced that the U.S. Department of Justice is investigating whether Ticketmaster parent company Live Nation has abused its huge market share in the live music industry.