If trying to buy tickets to Taylor Swift‘s upcoming tour felt like “going through several bear attacks,” the Blank Space singer agrees with you.
In a statement posted to Swift’s Instagram account on Friday, the singer criticized Ticketmaster‘s messy handling of ticket sales for her upcoming The Eras Tour.
On Thursday, Ticketmaster cancelled the general public sale after hellish presales left fans experiencing technical difficulties on the company’s website and waiting several hours in queues, only to be unable to make a purchase.
In her statement, Swift, 32, wrote that she asked Ticketmaster “multiple times if they could handle this kind of demand and we were assured they could.”
She claimed it was “excruciating for me to just watch mistakes happen with no recourse.”
It remains unclear if the public sale will be rescheduled at some point or if it’s cancelled entirely.
During Tuesday’s “Verified Fan” presale (an attempt by Ticketmaster to limit the number of scalpers and bots buying tickets to popular shows), fans experienced confusing technical outages and queue wait times of up to eight hours.
A Ticketmaster spokesperson told Variety the site’s technical issues were a result of a “staggering number of bot attacks as well as fans who didn’t have invite codes drove unprecedented traffic on our site.” The company said this led to “3.5 billion total system requests — 4x our previous peak.”
By Wednesday, tickets had been pushed onto resale websites like StubHub for tens of thousands of dollars. Reuters reported some early ticketholders were trying to sell their seats for as much as US$28,000 ($37,430).
Originally priced tickets ranged from US$49 ($65) to $449 ($600) each.
The upcoming tour will see Swift, 32, perform 52 shows across the U.S. There are no Canadian dates on Swift’s upcoming tour, but many fans north of the border had planned on heading south to catch a show — but maybe not at these prices.
Ticketmaster merged with Live Nation in 2010, resulting in control of more than 70 per cent of the primary ticketing and live event venues market.
Swift released her latest album, Midnights, in October. The U.S. tour is scheduled to start in March 2023 and end in August.
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