Taylor Swift has finally spoken to fans after technical issues at Ticketmaster thwarted her on-sale date for the Eras Tour. The singer shares fans’ anger and frustration, but has not yet offered a resolution.
In a note shared to social media, Swift starts by saying that in recent years, she brought most elements of her career in-house to protect fans from this kind of pain.
«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 says.
The fan pre-sale for the Eras Tour tickets started on Tuesday (Nov. 15), but due to overwhelming demand, many fans experienced long waits that ended with being logged out of Ticketmaster platforms and/or no tickets to a show. A second pre-sale was moved to the next day with similar issues.
Finally, on Thursday, Ticketmaster canceled the public on-sale, scheduled for Friday at 10AM local time.
We want to apologize to Taylor and all of her fans – especially those who had a terrible experience trying to purchase tickets. We feel we owe it to everyone to share some information to help explain what happened: https://t.co/1Gn4kRIvq8
— Ticketmaster (@Ticketmaster) November 19, 2022
In her statement to fans, Swift never mentions Ticketmaster by name, but expresses disappointment with how the sale of tickets went. «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,» she writes.
It’s truly amazing that 2.4 million people got tickets, but it really pisses me off that a lot of them feel like they went through several bear attacks to get them.
Live Nation’s chairman told CNBC that more than 14 million people flooded Ticketmaster on Tuesday when they were only expecting 1.5 million. Forbes reveals that resale tickets were being offered for $28,000 on re-sale sites later.
The final paragraph of Swift’s note indicates her wishes to offer more opportunities for fans who didn’t get tickets.
«All I can say is that my hope is to provide more opportunities for us to all get together and sing these songs,»
she says.
The Eras Tour is scheduled to begin on March 18.