Ticketmaster Fiasco Excruciating for Taylor Swift
Taylor Swift spoke Friday about the ticketing crisis that occurred this week. Many fans were unable to purchase tickets for her upcoming tour via Ticketmaster. Swift posted on Instagram Friday, “It goes without question that I am extremely protective of my fan,” Swift wrote. It’s hard for me to trust outside entities with these relationships and loyalties. It’s also excruciating to watch mistakes occur without recourse.
Swift blamed Ticketmaster and said that there were many reasons people had difficulty getting tickets.
The singer said, “I’m not going make excuses for anybody because we asked them multiple times if they could handle such a demand and they were assured that they could.” It’s amazing that tickets were sold to 2.4 million people. However, it is really irritating that many of them felt like they had been through bear attacks in order to obtain them.
Swift stated that Swift would work to improve the situation moving forward.
The sales for the new Eras Tour started Tuesday. However, the high demand caused a snarl on the ticketing site, infuriating customers who couldn’t get tickets. Customers complained that Ticketmaster didn’t load, stating that the platform wouldn’t let them access tickets even if they had a presale code for verified supporters.
Ticketmaster announced on Thursday that the sale to the general public was canceled because of “extraordinarily large demands on ticketing systems” and “insufficient remaining tickets inventory to meet those needs.”
Swift said, “To those who couldn’t get tickets to the concert, all I can do is say that my hope for us is to have more opportunities to sing these songs together.”
Anti-hero behavior
Ticketmaster’s issues began Tuesday when “verified fans” were able to purchase tickets. This is a way of eliminating bots and giving presale codes to individuals.
The “verified fans” platform was established in 2017 to assist Ticketmaster with situations of high demand. However, the system became overwhelmed when more than 3.5million people registered to become Swift’s “verified fans”. According to Ticketmaster, this is the largest registration ever made by the company.
“Historically, working using ‘Verified Fan invite codes has worked because we’ve been in a position to manage the volume of people coming to the site to buy tickets,” the company stated on Thursday in a blog posting that has since been removed. “However, this time we saw unprecedented traffic to our site due to the massive number of bot attacks and fans who didn’t have invite codes.”
Ticketmaster stated that “usually it takes us around an hour to sell through a show in a stadium,” but that the site slowed some sales and delayed others to “stabilize” the systems, which brought everything to a halt.
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