Tickets for the upcoming Taylor Swift United States tour were in such high demand that they caused the Ticketmaster website to crash.
Ticketmaster was forced to cancel a planned general public sale as the demand for tickets far outweighed the number of tickets available.
The music industry’s most prominent seller of concert tickets cited “extraordinarily high demands on ticketing systems and insufficient remaining ticket inventory to meet that demand” as the reason for cancelling Friday’s sale.
Ticketmaster explained that two million tickets were sold for the Eras tour during pre-sales on Tuesday, the most tickets ever sold on the platform in one day.
While the company claims its system, designed to deter bots from buying tickets, had previously undergone a smooth experience, this time was different.
Ticketmaster claimed that its system received 3.5 billion requests to buy tickets on Tuesday alone.
“Never before has a Verified Fan on sale sparked so much attention — or uninvited volume,” the company said, The Times reported.
Swift’s Eras tour kicks off next March with 52 dates across the United States. The singer will begin the tour in Arizona and end with five shows in Los Angeles.
International dates have not yet been announced for the tour.
Swift has not toured since 2018, a factor that could have contributed to the mass influx of people looking to buy tickets, said Greg Maffei, the CEO of Liberty Media, Ticketmaster’s largest shareholder.
The demand for Swift “could have filled 900 stadiums”, he told CNBC.
“This exceeded every expectation.”
The tour comes after Swift released her album Midnights in October, which has since topped the charts in several countries across the globe.
Compiled by Dylan Bettencourt
Pictured above: Taylor Swift
Image source: @PopSugar
