Taylor Swift has responded to the disastrous Eras Tour presale. Well, can you even call it a presale when Ticketmaster has canceled the general sale due to “insufficient ticket inventory” and “extraordinarily high demands”?
Swift began her statement by expressing her disappointment with Ticketmaster, noting her desire to protect her fans from outside parties. “It goes without saying that I’m extremely protective of my fans,” she began her Instagram story on November 18. “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 in loyalties and excruciating for me to watch mistakes happen with no recourse.”
The 11-time Grammy winner went on to say that she is looking into ways to improve the situation “going forward” and will not “make excuses” for the ticket sales company that is owned by Live Nation Entertainment. “We asked them, multiple times, if they could handle this kind of demand, and we were assured they could,” Swift 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.”
She concluded her message with a note to fans who were unable to secure tickets, writing, “All I can say is that my hope is to provide more opportunities for us to get all get together and sing these songs. Thank you for wanting to be there. You have no idea how much that means.”
Instagram/@taylorswift
Taylor Swift’s statement appears to focus solely on Ticketmaster’s bandwidth, which is just one issue fans faced during the two-day presale event. She did not address the site’s “dynamic pricing” system, which allows Ticketmaster to raise the price of tickets based on demand. According to Rolling Stone, artists are able to opt out of this tool. Swift also did not specify whether she plans to cancel tickets posted on resale sites (for tens of thousands of dollars, in some cases). According to BBC, Swift’s close friend Ed Sheeran canceled 10,000 tickets for this reason back in 2018.
