Furious Taylor Swift fans vow to break up Ticketmaster after public sale cancellations

The Swifties are furious. 

This week, pre-sales began for Taylor Swift’s upcoming The Eras Tour—her first in five years—and fans quickly encountered long queues, site glitches, and (for many) ultimate disappointment. On Thursday, Ticketmaster announced that the public on-sale would be canceled due to “extraordinarily high demands on ticketing systems and insufficient remaining ticket inventory to meet that demand.” 

Fans clamored in the comments to express their disappointment. “My mom and I have been huge Swifties for years . . . we did everything right,” one fan lamented. They said that they took part in both the Verified Fan pre-sale on Tuesday and the Capital One pre-sale on Wednesday, but came away empty-handed. “We’d do anything for tickets, but we can’t pay the ridiculous amounts from resellers.”

A post on the Ticketmaster website on Thursday attributed the Verified Fan pre-sale debacle to a “staggering number of bot attacks as well as fans who didn’t have invite codes [and who] drove unprecedented traffic on our site, resulting in 3.5 billion total system requests,” which is four times its previous peak. It estimates that these issues affected 15% of the interactions across the site.

That day, 2 million tickets were sold, “the most tickets ever sold for an artist in a single day,” according to Ticketmaster. Fourteen million fans (and bots) hit the site.

“The biggest venues and artists turn to us because we have the leading ticketing technology in the world—that doesn’t mean it’s perfect, and clearly for Taylor’s on sale it wasn’t,” the post included. 

Ticketmaster estimates that based on its site traffic, Taylor Swift would need to perform a stadium show every night for 2.5 years to satisfy the fan demand (Ticketmaster did not make clear if it accounted for the bots flooding its site in this estimate). 

But fans, and even politicians, have blamed Ticketmaster for the frustrating pre-sale process and its outsized power in the ticketing industry. Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota wrote in a letter to Live Nation Entertainment, Ticketmaster’s parent company, that its “power in the primary ticket market insulates it from the competitive pressures that typically push companies to innovate and improve their services. That can result in the types of dramatic service failures we saw this week, where consumers are the ones that pay the price.” 

Klobuchar was one of a number of lawmakers who weighed in on the issue this week along with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York State and Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut.

We’ve reached out to Ticketmaster for additional comment and will update this post if we hear back.

Some Swifties are going beyond outrage and looking toward ways to funnel their exasperation into action. One fan site is gathering fans interested in pressuring politicians and organizing directly. “There’s no fan base better suited to taking Ticketmaster down,” the site reads. 

Criticism of Ticketmaster’s merger with Live Nation and that outsize power is not new, but Swift’s highly sought-after tour brought those calls to the fore once again. 

For now, Swift fans and lawmakers are waiting for answers or hoping for additional tour dates. So far, the artist has not made a public statement on the matter. 

“I don’t have faith in Ticketmaster or Taylor Nation,” one fan wrote. “But I do have faith in Taylor. She will address this.”