If you were hoping to score Taylor Swift tour tickets during Friday’s general sale through Ticketmaster, then this is a moment you’ll remember all too well.
Ticketmaster announced Thursday afternoon that the public on-sale for Swift’s 2023 Eras Tour — which is coming to Gillette Stadium May 19-21 for three performances — would be canceled amid “extraordinarily high demands on ticketing systems and insufficient remaining ticket inventory to meet that demand.”
The announcement, made in a tweet, did not clarify what would happen to the remaining ticket inventory.
Due to extraordinarily high demands on ticketing systems and insufficient remaining ticket inventory to meet that demand, tomorrow's public on-sale for Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour has been cancelled.
— Ticketmaster (@Ticketmaster) November 17, 2022
This announcement comes after Ticketmaster reported “unprecedented traffic” for tour tickets during the “verified fan” pre-sale on Tuesday, where about 1.5 million fans were permitted to scramble for tickets to the 52 show dates. (Two million fans were placed on a waitlist, making it “the largest registration in history,” according to Ticketmaster.)
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The demand — more than 3.5 billion system requests, four times Ticketmaster’s previous peak, according to the platform — led to long wait-times and site outages that sent fans into a frenzy. Ticketmaster blamed “bot attacks as well as fans who didn’t have invite codes” for the surge in traffic and the ensuing technical complications.
Two million tickets were sold during the pre-sale, a record for an artist in a single day, according to Ticketmaster. In a statement, the platform noted that Swift “would need to perform over 900 stadium shows” to meet the demand incurred during the pre-sale. The Tennessee attorney general is investigating possible antitrust violations that occurred during the chaotic sale.
Fans were none too pleased about the sudden cancellation of the public on-sale, with many characterizing Ticketmaster as a monopoly that needs to be broken up.
The person that tweeted this from the Ticketmaster account. https://t.co/mhCrv6d6VU pic.twitter.com/QS0ocobuV9
— Tyler Roney (@TylerJRoney) November 17, 2022
Ticketmaster seems like a misnomer https://t.co/QoAY0dDJjv
— James Arkin (@JamesArkin) November 17, 2022
If any one consumer group in music is powerful enough to help break up the Ticketmaster monopoly, it’s the Swifties https://t.co/gfMlUWRh9E
— Isaac Feldberg (@isaacfeldberg) November 17, 2022
Swift has not gone on tour since 2018′s Reputation Stadium tour, which came to Gillette for three shows. She first played the Foxborough venue in 2010.
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Dana Gerber can be reached at dana.gerber@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @danagerber6.