Ticketmaster has 170,000 tickets still to sell for Taylor Swift’s upcoming ‘The Eras Tour‘ after the general sale was cancelled due to “extraordinarily high demand”.
According to Billboard, Ticketmaster will be distributing the remaining tickets over the next four weeks via Ticketstoday, which was originally created in the early 2000s for members of the Dave Matthews Band fan club to purchase tickets. It was acquired by Live Nation in 2008 and now “operates the Ticketmaster Verified Fan Request platform”.
On Monday (December 12), fans who had originally signed up to Ticketmaster’s Verified Fan program started receiving emails about a new sales window. In a bid to avoid the congestion of the first round of pre-sales, fans will be invited to select which tickets they’d like to purchase over the next week, alongside their card details. Sales are limited at two tickets per person while a digital lottery will decide who is successful.
The first round of sales for Taylor Swift’s ‘The Eras Tour’ saw thousands of fans reporting lengthy wait times, website outages, and hyper-inflated prices on resale sites (including Ticketmaster’s own). The ticketing company later admitted it buckled under the “historically unprecedented demand” they faced from Swift’s fans before cancelling the general sale.
In a statement of her own, Swift refused to “make excuses” for Ticketmaster, claiming that she and her team “asked them, multiple times, if they could hand this kind of demand” and were “assured they could”.
“It really pisses me off that a lot of them feel like they went through several bear attacks to get [tickets],” she added.
The controversy over Ticketmaster’s first sale had political implications as well, with US lawmakers calling for an investigation into the company. Meanwhile, a Senate-backed antitrust panel has organised a hearing on the lack of competition in the ticketing industry, while two US senators have called on the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to answer for “the steps” it’s taking to “combat the use and operation of bots in the online ticket marketplace”.
Several of Swift’s own fans have mounted their own campaigns to fight back against Ticketmaster, with around three dozen launching an initiative called ‘Vigilante Legal’. A class action lawsuit against Ticketmaster has also been filed, with plaintiffs accusing the company of violating two laws – the California Cartwright Act and the California Unfair Competition Law – during the first Verified Fan pre-sale.
The North American leg of Swift’s ‘Eras’ tour will begin in Glendale, Arizona next March, running on through to August with a total of 52 shows on the itinerary with special guests across the run including Paramore, beabadoobee, Phoebe Bridgers, Girl In Red, MUNA, Haim and more.
Earlier this week, Swift had a lawsuit accusing her of copyright infringement dismissed.
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