Taylor Swift has broken her silence on the week-long Ticketmaster debacle that left hundreds of her fans frustrated and heartbroken after being unable to buy tickets to her next tour on the platform.
“It goes without saying that I’m extremely protective of my fans,” Swift wrote in a statement posted to her Instagram story. “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,” Swift continued. “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 that they could. It’s truly amazing that 2.4 million people got tickets, but it really pisses me off that a lot of people felt like they went through bear attacks to get them.”
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“And to those 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,” Swift concluded, seeming to indicate that more tickets to the Eras tour would not be officially released. Swift’s manager, Ticketmaster and Liberty Media, Ticketmaster’s largest shareholder, did not respond to The Daily Beast’s requests for comment.
“Thank you for wanting to be there,” Swift concluded. “You have no idea how much that means.”
The Justice Department initiated an antitrust investigation into Ticketmaster’s owner that predates the calamitous Swift ticket rollout, the New York Times reported on Friday. According to sources familiar with the investigation, the Justice Department is seeking to determine whether the platform has a monopoly over the ticket-selling industry.
An investigation that concluded in 2019 into Live Nation Entertainment, Ticketmaster’s parent company, found that Live Nation had repeatedly flouted a Justice Department edict not to threaten venues with tour cancellation if they didn’t sell event tickets with Ticketmaster.
On Thursday, Ticketmaster canceled its planned Friday general sale of tickets to Swift’s Eras Tour, enraging thousands of fans who hadn’t yet been able to buy tickets and who have now been left to wonder whether they’ll ever get the chance.
But as early as Monday morning, it was abundantly clear to the most perceptive Taylor fans that Ticketmaster’s planned rollout of the pop star’s Eras Tour was shaping up to be a disaster: even after registering for Ticketmaster’s Verified Fan program, which was supposed to increase one’s chances of getting a ticket at a reasonable price by skipping long lines, millions of registrants were not selected to receive the code necessary to access the 10 a.m. Monday presale.
This turned out not to matter too much. The would-be ticket buyers who actually managed to join the presale almost instantly crashed the Ticketmaster site, and some who successfully in line waited in the queue for hours, only to be booted from their carts empty-handed before having the chance to buy anything.
On resale sites like StubHub, Taylor Swift tickets are being listed for tens of thousands of dollars.
A “staggering number of bot attacks as well as fans who didn’t have access codes drove unprecedented traffic on our site, resulting in 3.5 billion total system requests—4x our previous peak,” Ticketmaster said Thursday in a since-deleted blog post.
Madi, a 21-year-old Taylor Swift fan, wasn’t able to secure Eras tickets this week. “I’m trying to have hope but I feel pretty defeated,” Madi told The Daily Beast on Friday. “Resale sites are way too expensive. I could barely afford to buy the nosebleeds at face value, let alone what scalpers are charging.”
That being said, “my perception of Taylor has not changed at all,” Madi told The Daily Beast.
