Taylor Swift finally broke her silence on the chaos that ensued when tickets for her highly-anticipated Eras Tour went on sale on Ticketmaster Tuesday.
In a statement posted to Instagram on Friday, Swift acknowledged how “protective” she is of her fans and how she likes to do things “in house” “to improve the quality of 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 wrote.
On Thursday, Ticketmaster announced that the general sale for her Eras Tour would be canceled after they oversold the presale tickets on Tuesday and Wednesday, totaling 2.4 million tickets sold for the 52-show stadium tour.
In a statement shared on Ticketmaster’s website, the company said Swift’s tour sold over 2 million tickets during its verified-fan presale alone, more than any other artist in a single day. That statement has since been pulled down; Ticketmaster didn’t respond to Insider’s questions asking why the statement was removed.
Ticketmaster’s shocking announcement sparked outrage from politicians, Swifties, and astronauts, alike.
“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,” Swift said.
Swift continued: “It really pisses me off that a lot of them feel like they went through several bear attacks to get them.”
She acknowledged a “multitude of reasons” why fans had such a hard time securing tickets to one of her shows — including a frozen website, broken access codes, and a horde of errors. She said she is “still trying to figure out how this situation can be improved moving forward.”
Tuesday’s Era Tour presale was exclusive for “Verified Fans,” or people Ticketmaster randomly chose.
A presale for Capital One cardholders was supposed to take place later Tuesday but was postponed to Wednesday after major issues on Ticketmaster’s site.
A few hours after that presale began, Ticketmaster posted an update that all presale inventory had been depleted.
“Based on the volume of traffic to our site, Taylor would need to perform over 900 stadium shows (almost 20x the number of shows she is doing),” the statement from Ticketmaster said Thursday. “That’s a stadium show every single night for the next 2.5 years.”
Swift shared a message to the fans who missed out on tickets: “All I can say is that my hope is to provide more opportunities for us to all get together and sing these songs.”
The Eras Tour was announced on the heels of Swift’s 10th album “Midnights,” which smashed streaming records and sold more than 1 million copies in its first week.
It will be Swift’s first nationwide tour since the Reputation Stadium Tour in 2018. She was set to perform across Europe, Brazil, and the US in 2020 to promote her “Lover” album, but the festivals and concerts were canceled due to the coronavirus pandemic.
She has twice added more concert dates to the original Eras Tour schedule, bringing the total number of shows for the US leg up to 52. International dates have yet to be announced.
The Eras Tour kicks off on March 17, 2023, in Glendale, Arizona, and will visit many major cities across the US multiple times through August.
This is the 21st century, the first true Information Age, so there is really no reason why each venue can sell their own tickets online rather than going through third-party ticket sellers that stick all kinds of extra fees onto the price. Since each venue can only sell as many tickets as they have seats, it would be difficult to overwhelm the system.
I agree Wrangler. So, my message to fancy britches Taylor Swift is, put your money where your mouth is and do something about it. Sue Ticketmaster and include everyone else who has similarly wronged by them so that it becomes a class action suit where Ticketmaster would not only have to compensate celebrities (as if they needed compensation), but primarily the fans who have been over paying a middleman for years. Failure to do this on her part will make her outburst just a lot of hot air, or to put it another way, pissing into the wind since nothing will change otherwise.