Just a few days after Swift’s tour presale caused the website to break down and anger many fans, the decision to cancel Friday’s open ticket sales was made.
Due to “insufficient ticket inventory” to meet “extraordinarily high demands,” Ticketmaster has canceled sales for Taylor Swift‘s US leg of the tour.
Swift’s first tour in five years, the Eras Tour, was scheduled to go on sale to the general public on Friday morning.
But on Thursday night, Ticketmaster announced that Friday’s auction had been postponed because of “extraordinarily high demands on ticketing systems and insufficient remaining ticket inventory to fulfill that demand.”
Days after the presale for the tour caused the website to break down, leaving many fans angry and unable to obtain tickets, a decision has been made.
Fans were previously urged to exercise patience by the ticket seller on Twitter as “millions” attempted to get tickets during the presale, creating “historically enormous demand.”
After experiencing long wait times and website disruptions during the presales for Swift’s tour, which began on Tuesday, Swift’s followers, known as Swifties, have criticized the business on social media.
Fans reported spending up to eight hours in online lines to buy the tickets, which ranged in price from $49 (£41) to $449 (£377) each. However, many of them discovered they were too late.
A record 3.5 million people registered as verified fans, according to a statement released by Ticketmaster on Thursday. The company added that it had anticipated high demand for tickets.
The business stated that it intended to put 1.5 million of those people on a waiting list and invite 1.5 million of them to participate in the sale for all 52 performance dates, including the 47 sold through Ticketmaster.
However, it said that demand from people who had not previously registered as well as “bot” attacks undercut the scheme.
3.5 billion total system requests—or four times as many as at our previous peak—came from the startling number of bot attacks and fans without invite codes, according to Ticketmaster.
Never before has a sale of a Verified Fan attracted so much attention or unwelcome volume.
Fans and artists have long been disgruntled by Ticketmaster, which mostly controls the ticketing market, as a result of hidden fees, rising prices, and a limited supply of tickets due to presales.
Senator Amy Klobuchar expressed “great concern about the condition of competition in the ticketing sector and its detrimental impact on customers” in a letter to Live Nation Entertainment Inc., the parent company of Ticketmaster, this week.
Swift has not made any public remarks about the situation.
The 32-year-old singer’s tour’s American portion will begin on March 18 in Glendale, Arizona, and run through August.
During the tour, Swift will be joined by a variety of musicians, such as the solo artist Phoebe Bridgers and the bands Paramore and Haim.
Since Adele’s 30 was released in November of last year, Swift’s most recent album Midnights, which was released in October, had the highest first-week album sales.
With 72.5 million streams over the course of the first week, it also won the distinction of being the year’s most-streamed album.
