Ticketmaster cancels public sale for Taylor Swift tour, fans and lawmakers demand answers

If you’re a die hard Taylor Swift fan, chances are you’re pretty frustrated right now.

Ticketmaster has cancelled the general public ticket sale for Taylor Swift’s ‘Eras’ tour.

Executives are citing”extraordinarily high demands on ticketing systems and insufficient remaining ticket inventory” as the reason behind this decision.

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 (@Ticketmaster) November 17, 2022

Ticketmaster’s site crashed on Tuesday during the first release of tickets for Swift’s U.S. leg of the tour. The company has already sold more than 2 million tickets in pre-sales.

Now, a Democratic Senator is calling for answers, sending a letter to Ticketmaster’s parent company, Live Nation Entertainment.

In the letter, Senator and chair of the Senate antitrust panel, Amy Klobuchar, voices “serious concern.” She is worried “about the state of competition in the ticketing industry and its harmful impact on consumers.”

“Ticketmaster’s power in the primary ticket market insulates it from the competitive pressures that typically push companies to innovate and improve their services.”

In a statement released by the ticketing giant, the company says it did anticipate heavy demand for tickets to see Swift perform on her first tour in five years. But extreme interest, combined with bot attacks, led to “unprecedented traffic on the site.”

The company says around 15 per cent of interactions on the site experienced issues and overall it sold 2 million tickets on Tuesday alone.

from her first upload 🙂 to the #TSAntiHeroChallenge and every era in between, congratulations to @taylorswift13 on reaching 50 million subscribers on youtube! pic.twitter.com/xo0VVznZQL

— YouTube (@YouTube) November 17, 2022

Meanwhile, Klobuchar is asking Live Nation Chief Executive Michael Rapino to provide an explanation.

The Senator wants to know how much of the company’s profits have been spent on upgrading ticketing technology and how many tour tickets were reserved for the presale.

The Ticketmaster statement did not respond to these questions.