Business)Anyone looking to buy a ticket to Taylor Swift's new tour may be out of luck.
Ticketmaster said on Thursday that "due to extraordinarily high demands on ticketing systems and insufficient remaining ticket inventory to meet that demand," Friday's public ticket sales for Swift's Eras Tour has been canceled.
The sudden cancellation comes after Ticketmaster said Thursday that more than two million tickets were sold Tuesday for her upcoming tour — the most ever sold for an artist in a single day. It caused a near meltdown of its website.
Ticketmaster basically said that its "Verified Fans" system, a mechanism aimed at eliminating bots that gives presale codes to individuals, couldn't keep up with the intense demand. Roughly 3.5 million people signed up for the program to buy Swift tickets, its "largest registration in history." That unprecedented demand, combined with a "staggering number of bot attacks as well as fans who didn't have invite codes" drove "unprecedented traffic" to its site, Ticketmaster said, and, essentially, broke it.
"Never before has a Verified Fan on sale sparked so much attention -- or uninvited volume," Ticketmaster said in the blog post. "This disrupted the predictability and reliability that is the hallmark of our Verified Fan platform."
On Tuesday morning, Ticketmaster told CNN Business that the website was "not down" and that "people are actively purchasing tickets." It added that "there has been historically unprecedented demand with millions showing up" to buy tickets for Swift's tour.
The debacle not only stirred outrage among Swift's fans, but also caught the ire of politicians. Senator Amy Klobuchar criticized Ticketmaster in an open letter to its CEO, saying she has "serious concerns" about the company's operations.
Mixed messages, long wait times and temporary outages on the Ticketmaster website left scores of fans frustrated and empty-handed when the first wave of tickets for the 52-date Eras Tour, scheduled for next year and Swift's first since 2018, went on sale on Tuesday.
Ticketmaster rescheduled additional rounds due to what it called "historically unprecedented demand," saying "millions" had tried to buy pre-sale tickets and hundreds of thousands had done so successfully.
On Thursday afternoon, the day before tickets were due to open to the general public, it announced that the sale had been cancelled altogether due to "extraordinarily high demands on ticketing systems and insufficient remaining ticket inventory to meet that demand."
The frenzy has brought renewed scrutiny to the giant Ticketmaster, which critics have long accused of abusing its market power at the expense of consumers. Would-be concertgoers have complained vocally about recent incidents with near-instant sellouts and skyrocketing prices, and artists like Pearl Jam and Bruce Springsteen have feuded with it over the decades.
One common complaint is that there doesn't seem to be a clear alternative or competitor to Ticketmaster, especially after it merged with concert provider Live Nation in 2010 (a controversial move that required conditional approval from the U.S. Department of Justice).
Ticketmaster has not responded to NPR's request for comment, but did publish a statement on Thursday called "The Taylor Swift On Sale Explained."
"Taylor Swift's tour sale is a perfect example of how the Live Nation/Ticketmaster merger harms consumers by creating a near-monopoly," tweeted Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), one of several lawmakers who has long called for investigation and accountability into the company, especially after becoming a subsidiary of concert behemoth Live Nation.
And he took some inspiration from the lyrics of Swift herself: "Consumers deserve better than this anti-hero behavior."
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