Taylor Swift: Ticketmaster fiasco ‘excruciating for me’

New York
CNN Business
 — 

Taylor Swift spoke out Friday about the ticketing debacle that took place this week, as many fans were unable to purchase tickets for her upcoming tour on Ticketmaster.

“It goes without saying that I’m extremely protective of my fans,” Swift wrote on Instagram on Friday. “It’s really difficult for me to trust an outside entity with these relationships and loyalties, and excruciating for me to just watch mistakes happen with no recourse.”

Swift blamed Ticketmaster for the snafu, noting that there were a “multitude of reasons why people had such a hard time” getting tickets.

“I’m not going to make excuses for anyone because we asked them, multiple times, if they could handle this kind of demand and we were assured they could,” the singer wrote. “It’s truly amazing that 2.4 million people got tickets, but it really pisses me off that a lot of them feel like they went through several bear attacks to get them.”

Swift added that she would try to “figure out how this situation can be improved moving forward.”

Sales for the singer’s new Eras Tour began Tuesday, but the heavy demand snarled the ticketing site, infuriating fans who couldn’t snag tickets. Customers complained about Ticketmaster not loading, saying the platform didn’t allow them to access tickets, even if they had a pre-sale code for verified fans.

On Thursday, Ticketmaster announced that the sale to the general public, which was scheduled to begin Friday, had been canceled due to “extraordinarily high demands on ticketing systems and insufficient remaining ticket inventory to meet that demand.”

“To those who didn’t get tickets, all I can say is that my hope is to provide more opportunities for us to get together and sing these songs,” Swift added.

The issues for Ticketmaster started on Tuesday, when the site’s sale kicked off for “verified fans” — a mechanism aimed at eliminating bots that gives presale codes to individuals.

The “verified fan” platform was created in 2017 to help Ticketmaster handle situations of enormous demand, but as more than 3.5 million people pre-registered to be a Swift “verified fan” the system became overwhelmed. That’s the largest registration in the company’s history, according to Ticketmaster.

“Historically, working with ‘Verified Fan’ invite codes has worked as we’ve been able to manage the volume coming into the site to shop for tickets,” the company wrote on Thursday in a blog post that has since been taken down. “However, this time the staggering number of bot attacks as well as fans who didn’t have invite codes drove unprecedented traffic on our site.”

Ticketmaster noted that it “usually takes us about an hour to sell through a stadium show,” but the site slowed down some sales while delaying others to “stabilize the systems.” That brought everything to a halt.

…