Joe GallopLive Nation Entertainment-owned Ticketmaster has provided further insight into the events that led to the cancellation of the public on-sale for Taylor’s Swift’s US stadium tour.
Ticketmaster said, “We owe it to everyone to share some information to help explain what happened.” Among the issued highlighted are that the ticketing operation was the subject of a “staggering” number of bot attacks during the pre-sale and “unprecedented demand” for tickets, with 3.5 billion requests.
The company said usually around 40% of invited fans actually show up and buy tickets, and most purchase an average of three tickets. This time around 1.5m people were sent codes to join the onsale for all 52 show dates, including the 47 sold by Ticketmaster. It said the remaining 2m verified fans were placed on a waiting list.
“It usually takes us about an hour to sell through a stadium show, but we slowed down some sales and pushed back others to stabilise the systems. The trade off was longer wait times in queue for some fans,” the ticketing giant said.
“Overall, we estimate about 15% of interactions across the site experienced issues, and that’s 15% too many, including passcode validation errors that caused fans to lose tickets they had carted.”
Despite the disruptions, the ticketing company said a new sales record was set. More than 2m tickets were sold on its site for Swift’s tour – the most tickets ever sold for an artist in a single day.
It said all 2m tickets were sold to verified fans: “No one who wasn’t verified was allowed to enter the queue, but the huge traffic hitting the site overall meant we had to slow down queues to keep them stable.”
The tour saw 2.4 million tickets sold for the tour overall across onsales for verified fans and Capital One cardholders, on both Ticketmaster and SeatGeek. Less than 5% of the tickets for the tour have been sold or posted for resale on the secondary market. It said onsales that don’t use its Verified Fan feature typically see 20-30% of inventory end up on secondary markets.
The company said, “We’re working to shore up our tech for the new bar that has been set by demand for the Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour. Once we get through that, if there are any next steps, updates will be shared accordingly.
“Even when a high demand onsale goes flawlessly from a tech perspective, many fans are left empty handed. For example: based on the volume of traffic to our site, Taylor would need to perform over 900 stadium shows (almost 20x the number of shows she is doing)…that’s a stadium show every single night for the next 2.5 years. While it’s impossible for everyone to get tickets to these shows, we know we can do more to improve the experience and that’s what we’re focused on.”