As anyone with a Twitter account (for now, anyway) and a vague familiarity with Taylor Swift likely already knows, all is not well in the Swiftie kingdom. Yesterday, Ticketmaster announced that today's planned public on-sale for Swift's the Eras Tour — which will see Swift playing 52 shows in North America next year to thousands upon thousands of screaming fans who paid thousands upon thousands of dollars to be there — was cancelled due to "extraordinarily high demands on ticketing systems and insufficient remaining ticket inventory to meet that demand."
UPDATE (11/18, 1:29 p.m. ET): A new report by the New York Times claims that the Justice Department has opened an investigation into Ticketmaster's parent company, looking into whether Live Nation Entertainment has abused its power over the live music industry. According to several anonymous sources contacted by the New York Times, the investigation was started several months before the Eras Tour fiasco.
This cancellation came after hordes of Swifties the world over spent hours (and likely took out secret new mortgages on their parents' homes) attempting to navigate Tickmaster's famously difficult-to-use and ridiculously expensive ticket-purchasing system as the website crashed due to intense traffic.
The whole thing was a Grade A clusterfuck, and it left thousands of Taylor Swift fans — unable to secure tickets to what, for them, might be a once-in-a-lifetime experience — incredibly upset.
Taylor Swift herself is apparently none too happy about the whole situation either, as today saw her release a statement on the fiasco, writing that Ticketmaster's failure to provide fans with tickets (which is, y'know, allegedly the entire point of Ticketmaster) "really pisses [her] off."
Swift claims in the statement, posted to her Instagram stories, that Ticketmaster assured her team multiple times that they could handle the increased traffic and intense demand. "It's really difficult for me to trust an outside entity with these relationships and loyalties, and excruciating for me to just watch mistakes happen with no recourse," she writes.
Read the whole thing below:
Well. It goes without saying that I'm extremely protective of my fans. We've been doing this for decades together and over the years, I've brought so many elements of my career in house. I've done this SPECIFICALLY to improve the quality of my fans' experience by doing it myself with my team who care as much about my fans as I do. It's really difficult for me to trust an outside entity with these relationships and loyalties, and excruciating for me to just watch mistakes happen with no recourse.
There are a multitude of reasons why people had such a hard time trying to get tickets and I'm trying to figure out how this situation can be improved moving forward. 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. It's truly amazing that 2.4 million people got tickets, but it really pisses me off that a lot of them felt like they went through several bear attacks to get them.
And to those who didn't get tickets, all I can say is that my hope is to provide more opportunities for us all to get together and sing these songs. Thank you for wanting to be there. You have no idea how much that means.
UPDATE (11/18, 1:29 p.m. ET): A new report by the New York Times claims that the Justice Department has opened an investigation into Ticketmaster's parent company, looking into whether Live Nation Entertainment has abused its power over the live music industry. According to several anonymous sources contacted by the New York Times, the investigation was started several months before the Eras Tour fiasco.
This cancellation came after hordes of Swifties the world over spent hours (and likely took out secret new mortgages on their parents' homes) attempting to navigate Tickmaster's famously difficult-to-use and ridiculously expensive ticket-purchasing system as the website crashed due to intense traffic.
The whole thing was a Grade A clusterfuck, and it left thousands of Taylor Swift fans — unable to secure tickets to what, for them, might be a once-in-a-lifetime experience — incredibly upset.
Taylor Swift herself is apparently none too happy about the whole situation either, as today saw her release a statement on the fiasco, writing that Ticketmaster's failure to provide fans with tickets (which is, y'know, allegedly the entire point of Ticketmaster) "really pisses [her] off."
Swift claims in the statement, posted to her Instagram stories, that Ticketmaster assured her team multiple times that they could handle the increased traffic and intense demand. "It's really difficult for me to trust an outside entity with these relationships and loyalties, and excruciating for me to just watch mistakes happen with no recourse," she writes.
Read the whole thing below:
Well. It goes without saying that I'm extremely protective of my fans. We've been doing this for decades together and over the years, I've brought so many elements of my career in house. I've done this SPECIFICALLY to improve the quality of my fans' experience by doing it myself with my team who care as much about my fans as I do. It's really difficult for me to trust an outside entity with these relationships and loyalties, and excruciating for me to just watch mistakes happen with no recourse.
There are a multitude of reasons why people had such a hard time trying to get tickets and I'm trying to figure out how this situation can be improved moving forward. 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. It's truly amazing that 2.4 million people got tickets, but it really pisses me off that a lot of them felt like they went through several bear attacks to get them.
And to those who didn't get tickets, all I can say is that my hope is to provide more opportunities for us all to get together and sing these songs. Thank you for wanting to be there. You have no idea how much that means.