Ticketmaster announced Taylor Swift‘s Eras Tour has broken several records “and parts of our website.”
Ticketmaster issued a statement Thursday regarding Taylor’s historic Verified Fan pre-sale, which sent fans into meltdown mode.
“We knew this would be big. Over 3.5 million people pre-registered for Taylor’s Verified Fan, which is the largest registration in history,” the statement explained.
Of that number, Ticketmaster invited 1.5 million fans to take part in the Verified Fans pre-sale, but a “staggering number of bot attacks as well as fans who didn’t have invite codes drove unprecedented traffic on our site, resulting in 3.5 billion total system requests – 4x our previous peak.”
“Never before has a Verified Fan on sale sparked so much attention,” Ticketmaster continued. The company then revealed, “Over 2 million tickets were sold for Taylor’s shows on Nov. 15 – the most tickets ever sold for an artist in a single day.” The company maintained “every ticket was sold to a buyer with a Verified Fan code.”
Ticketmaster vowed to use this as a learning lesson to “improve the experience.” It concluded, “The biggest venues and artists turn to us because we have the leading ticketing technology in the world – that doesn’t mean it’s perfect, and clearly for Taylor’s on sale it wasn’t.”
As for those upset fans who were left empty handed, Ticketmaster says the math isn’t on their side. “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,” they remarked.
Fans have one last chance at tickets. While presale tickets for the Eras Tour are sold out, general ticket sales go live Friday at 10 a.m. local venue time.
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