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Taylor Swift has broken her silence regarding the Ticketmaster pre-sale debacle, posting a statement on her Instagram story on Friday.
On Tuesday, ticket pre-sales for her 2023 Eras Tour turned to madness with a historic rush of fans attempting to buy pre-sale tickets, resulting in hours-long waits and website crashes on the Ticketmaster site. On Thursday, the cite canceled the general sale, which was set to take place on Friday, due to "extraordinarily high demands on ticketing systems and insufficient remaining ticket inventory to meet that demand."
The ticket distribution company has faced backlash from fans and soon could be subject to a federal probe.
On Friday, Swift addressed the chaos of earlier this week on Instagram. Her full statement read:
"Well. It goes without saying that I'm extremely protective of my fans. We've been doing this for decades together and over the years, I've brought so many elements of my career in house. I've done this SPECIFICALLY to improve the quality of my fans' experience by doing it myself with my team who care as much about my fans as I do. 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.
"There are a multitude of reasons why people had such a hard time trying to get tickets and I'm trying to figure out how this situation can be improved moving forward. 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. 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.
"And to those who didn't get tickets, all I can say is that my hope is to provide more opportunities for us to all get together and sing these songs. Thank you for wanting to be there. You have no idea how much that means."
The hellish ticket-purchasing experience for fans was brought on further by the extremely high ticket pricing and overloaded and underprepared website servers, but Live Nation chairman Greg Maffei told CNBC that the reality was, there were too many fans trying to buy tickets.
"Reality is it's a function of the massive demand that Taylor Swift has. The site was supposed to be opened up for 1.5 million verified Taylor Swift Fans," he said. "We had 14 million people hit the site––including bots, another story, which are not supposed to be there. And despite all the challenges and the breakdowns, we did sell over 2 million tickets that day. We could have filled 900 stadiums."
Live Nation and Ticketmaster merged in 2010, and the Department of Justice at the time had imposed conditions that were meant to preserve and promote ticketing competition, though, by 2019, that decree had been violated.
Besides the angered Swift fans, calls for investigations into Ticketmaster were drawn out this week.
"Daily reminder that Ticketmaster is a monopoly, it's merger with Live Nation should never have been approved, and they need to be reigned in," Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York tweeted Tuesday. "Break them up."
Newsweek reached out to a representative for Swift for comment.
Update 11/18/22 1:35 p.m. ET: This article was updated with more information.
About the writer
Emma Mayer is a Newsweek Culture Writer based in Wyoming. Her focus is reporting on celebrities, books, movies, and music. ... Read more