Clearly vibing with “Anti-Hero,” Ticketmaster cancels public sale for Taylor Swift’s Eras tour
After a presale for Taylor Swift's first tour in five years saw nearly 14 million people attempt to buy tickets, a planned Friday public sale won't be happening
Aux News ticketmaster
Swifties, fly your red knit scarves at half-mast today: Ticketmaster is nixing Friday’s planned general public sale for Taylor Swift’s Eras tour.
“Due to extraordinarily high demands on ticketing systems and insufficient remaining ticket inventory to meet that demand, tomorrow’s public on-sale for Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour has been cancelled,” Ticketmaster shared via Twitter on Thursday afternoon.
The Eras Tour is one of Swift’s biggest ever, and she’s no stranger to a stadium. Proponing to celebrate the many different seasons of her career alongside a bevy of top-notch supporting acts, including Phoebe Bridgers, Paramore, and Haim. Shows kick off in Glendale, Arizona on March 18, 2023.
The massive 52-date tour—Swift’s first in five years—saw nearly 14 million people try to buy tickets during presale, leading to extensive frustration among fans, per Live Nation chair Greg Maffei. Maffei tells Forbes that Ticketmaster planned to open presale to 1.5 million “verified” Swift fans, but were met with exponentially more fans (and bots) trying to purchase tickets.
All in all, Swift sold over 2 million tickets in presale. Swift and her team have yet to share any statements about the cancellation, or update fans on when—and more importantly, if—they’ll be able to secure tickets.
The Eras Tour has become a canary in the coal mine of sorts for Ticketmaster (well, if the canary has been coughing and sputtering on ash for years). A long-criticized 2010 merger between Ticketmaster and Live Nation has effectively created a monopoly in ticketing. Lawmakers like Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez have been publicly critical of the merger in recent days as survivors of the presale lament the state of affairs.
“Daily reminder that Ticketmaster is a monopoly, its merger with LiveNation should never have been approved, and they need to be reigned in,” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted on November 14, the day Swift’s presale began. “Break them up.”
56 Comments
Mrs. F. bought six tix for Pittsburgh and has five friends to go with. Life is good for her. But it was a time-consuming PITA to get them. Also, first suckers.
Yeah, like you and the missus are Ticketmaster’s first suckers. Dream on.
Tell me about it! He’s barely a Firstsucker Proxy.
Newb
She can go to hell! I tried to get tickets forPutrsburgh for my daughter’s Christmas present, and of course was not chosen for pre-sale and thus was screwed. Om very upset about it. It’s more upsetting knowing that people are snatching up all 6 of their possible tickets while other people who only want 2 are left in the cold.
Fools and their money *shrug*
The Live Nation merger sucks even more when you realize how many venues they operate. Venues which will never switch away from Ticketmaster no matter how much better/cheaper the competition will ever be.
It used to be that you could go to the venue and buy tickets to avoid the Ticketmaster fees, not anymore. I worked near a venue and tried. Still got nailled with the fees.The fees are bullshit. I get that back in the day, you had to go to a store that had a Ticketmaster terminal or call to buy, and print the tickets, so yeah, a fee. But on every ticket? I can see on the entire order, but not on every ticket. Especially, now that a lot of shows are going paper free and you use the app. When they first started the print at home tickets, they charged a $5 fee so you could print them at home while you could have them mailed to you for free.
That’s interesting. At my box office, we’re starting to consider charging to mail tix as a way to encourage customers to do print at home so that we can save on the cost of postage and mailing materials.
I’m sure there’s an obvious answer that I’m overlooking, but how does a competitor(s) for Ticketmaster help? There’s still only a finite number of seats, and a much larger number of butts wanting to fill them (at least for Taylor Swift). They’re always going to sell out.
Venues would have a specific ticket seller for their dates. That way not everyone will bog down one seller’s website. This won’t curb demand but will make it easier on the consumers when buying tickets. Also, those other ticket sellers could have lower fees. They could maybe even ask for a smaller percentage from the artists and venues, which would force ticketmaster to lower their fees or lose out on more business.
Because Ticketmaster fucked up this sale process in every possible way, including its administration of several pre-sale promotions etc. If there was another channel, or the arena could sell directly, this whole mess would have been avoided.
I used to drive up to an hour to buy tickets at venues rather than pay ticketmaster or a competitor’s (back when they existed) markups.
I spent more than one night sleeping in a car in the parking lot of a record store, checking in every hour to maintain my spot on the list (which was administered by some rando, not even an employee of the store, yet everyone abided by it).
As someone who runs a (non-Ticketmaster) box office, I strongly recommend this if you have the ability to do it. It really depends on the fees. My box office’s fees are actually low compared to a lot (flat rate per ticket that usually averages to somewhere between 4-9% of ticket price), but they can also add up if you’re buying multiple tickets. It may be worth it if you’re buying 4+ tickets, especially. If you have the ability to go get tix in person (factoring in travel and time cost), totally go to the in-person box office where most fees are usually waived. (We waive for walk-ups.)
Ticketmaster was getting an extra cut from a lot of the pre-sale promotions, which arguably incentivized them to take on more promotions than their website could handle. If the artist or the venues could space out who is selling what tickets where, the infrastructure would be less likely to hit a snag, but Ticketmaster would also have more reason to care about not doing a less than stellar job. Most of the errors were avoidable and very few of them relate to the finite number of seats – There were too many promotions being run at the same time, the timing of the on-sale windows was poorly managed, etc.
Add-on fees might be lower.
I mean… if you read any of the details whatsoever, then it should be very easy to understand without someone needing to explain it to you.
how does a competitor(s) for Ticketmaster help?You’re right about live ticket sales. The only thing that can help is to go back to the (short-lived) system that required the ticket purchaser to show up at the venue with the card used to buy the tickets. This locked out the scalpers, which made the bots pointless. I managed to get some good Springsteen tickets under that system about 10 years ago. I’m sure that Ticketmaster killed that system once they realized how much more money they could make by getting in on the resale game themselves via StubHub.I think that the realistic answer would be for major artists to embrace simulcasting. I saw a couple of Grateful Dead shows simulcast to a movie theatre. With a good director, the show can be as good or better than being in a stadium. All in all, I enjoyed those shows more than I would have if I had been able to get tickets for the Soldier Field shows, what with the hassle of getting to and from the venue, and having to deal with those crowds. More viewing opportunities would reduce the mania around getting tickets to the live stadium performance.
“Proponing”? Is this some neologism of the youngs which I’ve yet to be made privy to?
I wondered the same thing. Evidently it really is a wordhttps://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/proponePerhaps the writer is Scottish?
That would explain the writer’s repeated use of “och aye the noo”
Bear in mind that it’s not even a complete sentence: Proponing to celebrate the many different seasons of her career alongside a bevy of top-notch supporting acts, including Phoebe Bridgers, Paramore, and Haim.
I know, which makes it even harder to try to tease out its meaning from context, as it seems there may be something else missing from the sentence.
I read it as “prolapse”.
Is there any way we can get an explanation of what a “public sale” is? Or how it’s different from just…buying the tickets off the website?
I mean I *think* that’s what that is, the pre-sale required you to have some code or jump through some other kind of hoop and the quantity was limited to a small percentage of tickets that were actually available.
I believe pre-sale was a mix of fans possible from her fan club and Capital One cardholders.
This whole thing is a massive fuck-up. Ticketmaster held a lottery to pre-select a group of people who would have access to the pre-sale. My wife and daughters wanted to go, so we threw in and were selected. Ticketmaster emailed us a unique code, and at 9:30 Tuesday we logged in to get our spot in the queue for sales to begin at 10AM. I’m sure you’ve already read that this process alone crashed Ticketmaster’s server for three hours (as if they didn’t know exactly how many people they’d selected to participate, and controlled the pace that people were allowed off the queue. Claims that the crash was due to “unprecedented demand” are complete bullshit – THEY set the numbers and pace). Many of the people we know who did get selected got error messages when they finally were allowed to try to buy tickets and were just SOL. Now it appears they also sold ALL of every single shows’ tickets through this pre-sale process, while it was supposed to be maybe 20%.The ineptitude of this debacle is honestly hard to wrap your head around. Ticketmaster controlled how many pre-sale slots there would be and how many tickets the holder of any one code could purchase (6). 70,000 person arena x 20% = 14,00014,000 / max 6 tickets = 2,333 pre-sale approvals per show, with a line behind them in case people didn’t buy all 6Ticketmaster: “Math is hard, but who gives a shit because we’re a monopoly.”
I would actually be interested to know what specifically went wrong because if this was just about too many simultaneous requests then they should be crashing all the time. And hell maybe they are and this is the first time people noticed.
Many things went wrong, but the main reason for the crashes was that you could enter the ticket queue without entering your presale code. You only needed to enter your code when you wanted to see the available tickets (after you got through the queue to the ticket-buyer stage).This is what allowed all the bots and non-presale folks onto the site. Had they asked for your presale code in order to allow you entry to the queue, the process would have gone 1000 times smoother.This doesn’t explain why they allowed 100% of the tickets to go to the presale folks though…
I could see that being a possibility, but to me the bigger issue is they sold out the entire tour with pre-sales before people who didn’t jump through all those hoops ever got a chance to buy a single ticket. That’s the type of behavior that will invite FTC antitrust scrutiny, especially when you layer in the Live Nation is the promoter in every venue she’s playing.
Wait they were supposed to sell a small percentage yet sold them all out? That’s fucking ridiculous.
I doubt it’s the first time that’s happened, this one is just especially noteworthy since so many people got screwed over. I’m pretty sure this happened when I tried to get Janelle Monae tickets through Live Nation/Ticketmaster several years ago—I missed the presale because I was working somewhere with no cell reception, and when the general sale started, it only showed resale tickets.
I waiting to see who owns up to that fuckup. Was it Swift and her team or Ticketmaster?
I like that this is what you get mad about and not antisemitism
I like how toure too fucking stupid to conceive of the fact that people can be upset about more than one thing at a time, or that being upset about one things does not somehow magically negate your ability to also care about about other things.I thought you seemed pretty dumb when you couldnt use context clues to figure out what public sale was. Now I know for sure that you are aggressively fucking stupid.
It’s the kind of sale where you shave a bit, gather it all up and put up a stand with bags o -Oh sorry you said “PUBLIC” sale
General public, instead of the people eligible for pre-sale.
I mean…. can you not use common freaking sense to determine the difference between pre-sale and public sale? It really shouldnt be very difficult to figure out.
The system is even more fucked than it used to be. You have to register with ticketmaster in advance for popular concerts (my introduction was trying to get Springsteen tickets). I ended up not getting tickets anyway because ticketmaster automatically scaled the price of Springsteen tickets according to demand, and mediocre seats were going for $500 within fifteen or twenty minutes. By the time people can just go on the website and buy tickets, the good seats (ie, anything with a view) are gone. But in this case it’s a moot point, since ticketmaster isn’t even letting people go on the website and buy tickets if they didn’t preregister.
“Ah, Smithers, you laughed when I bought Ticketmaster! ‘No one’s going to pay a hundred percent service charge!’”“It does ensure a healthy mix of the rich and the ignorant, sir.”
Ticketmaster about to have all of Space coming for its ass
Plus I hear those guys have giant lasers.
Where did the rest of the tickets go? Does Ticketmaster just hold on to them, then release them on StubHub for 10x the cost?Would the Garth Brooks approach-keep adding shows at a venue until the shows stop selling out-help with this? Or would Ticketmaster always get their pound of flesh by jacking up the price in this way?
“Where did the rest of the tickets go? Does Ticketmaster just hold on to them, then release them on StubHub for 10x the cost?”Yes.
“proponing”?
“
After a presale for Taylor Swift’s first tour in five years”
Four years.
How popular is her act?They have enough buyers and pre-sales people lined up that Taylor Swift could have 900 stadium tours – one a day for two and a half years.
Damn.
What does someone like this, one of those “went home with 26 Grammys this year” type people, do with all these awards? Does she have a closet she chucks them all into?
They have to pick up the “real” one later. I imagine most people just send an intern from corporate and put them up in the office.
Not going to buy Swift tickets but I do like that Ticketmaster screwed up so badly that the company may be broken apart.
“insufficient remaining ticket inventory” Of tickets they are releasing to the public as opposed to the many that are kept for various promotions, VIPs, etc.
Ticketmaster is designed around selling tickets to scalpers, not fans. There was a report on this done by the CBC a few years ago. The problem is that there aren’t any laws (in the US or Canada) preventing them from doing this – https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/ticketmaster-prices-scalpers-bruno-mars-1.4826914
So Ticketmaster can throw up their hands and say “Wow that’s crazy! The tickets are all gone!” but that was their plan all along. True Taylor Swift fans should either lobby the US and Canadian Governments for new scalping laws, or become ticket scalpers themselves so they can receive preferential treatment from Ticketmaster.
From Ticketmaster’s perspective, nothing went wrong. They sold all of their inventory, thus have no incentive to increase their costs.