LOS ANGELES – Taylor Swift fans trying to score tickets to the American singer’s highly anticipated tour crashed the Ticketmaster website, with thousands reporting outages on the tracking site Downdetector.com on Tuesday morning.
Ticketmaster Fan Support tweeted that West Coast dates originally scheduled to go on sale at 10am local time would instead be taking place at 3pm, with queues opening 30 minutes before.
“There has been unprecedented demand with millions showing up to buy tickets,” the company said in the tweet. “Hundreds of thousands of tickets have been sold.”
Ticketmaster told Bloomberg that demand was more than twice the number of tickets available. The artiste’s team chose to use the company’s verified fan system because it is the best way to get tickets in the hands of actual fans, and not ticket-buying services.
Since Swift, 32, announced The Eras Tour earlier in November, it has been something of a Hunger Games to land a ticket to one of her shows.
Fans were asked to register on the Ticketmaster website for the chance to nab a pre-sale code, but many received only a waitlist notification instead.
Within hours of going on sale on Tuesday morning, tickets started populating the Gametime resale site, with some priced as high as US$20,900 (S$28,600) each for the show at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California.
Tickets for the public go on sale on Friday at 10am. Complaints about the sales snafus prompted Democratic New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to tweet that the 2010 merger between Ticketmaster, a leader in ticket sales, and Live Nation Entertainment, the largest concert promoter, should not have been allowed to happen.
“Break them up,’’ she wrote.
As pandemic concerns wane and people continue to spend on premium in-person experiences, Live Nation is coming off its biggest summer concert season in history. Ticket prices and the difficulty buying seats have been a recurring focus of politicians responding to fan outrage, however.
Earlier this year, sales of American rock legend Bruce Springsteen’s tour tickets reached US$5,000 a seat, prompting New Jersey Congressman Bill Pascrell, also a Democrat, to demand an explanation for the “exorbitant’’ markups.
A Ticketmaster spokesman said that 18 per cent of Springsteen’s tour tickets in the United States sold for less than US$99, while 1 per cent of tickets sold for more than US$1,000.
Live Nation did not immediately respond to a request for comment about Ms Ocasio-Cortez’s tweet.
Ticketmaster noted that Swift’s tour is promoted by AEG and Messina Touring Group, not Live Nation. SeatGeek is also selling tickets directly from the promoters.
Swift, who is riding high following the release in October of her latest album, Midnights, has added more shows. Her tour kicks off on March 17 in Glendale, Arizona, at State Farm Stadium and ends on Aug 9 in Inglewood, California, at SoFi Stadium. BLOOMBERG
