Following the sale of over 2 million tickets for the 2023 tour via Ticketmaster’s Verified Fan presale on Tuesday, the ticketing company announced on Thursday that a planned general sale for all other customers has been canceled.
“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 tweeted.
Because many fans were able to purchase The Eras Tour tickets on Tuesday, others were left waiting in hour-long Ticketmaster lines that eventually crashed or sold out. The company later tweeted about “historically unprecedented demand” for tour tickets, and the Capital One cardholder presale scheduled for the same day was rescheduled for Wednesday.
Liberty Media CEO Greg Maffei (Liberty owns a portion of Live Nation, of which Ticketmaster is a subsidiary) blamed the chaos on “massive demand” for Swift tickets in a recent interview with CNBC.
“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.”
Swift’s most recent concert tour, the Reputation Stadium Tour, sold 2.8 million tickets across 53 global dates in 2018, making it the highest-grossing U.S. tour of all time. Her upcoming tour includes 52 performances in North America alone.
The Eras Tour will begin in Arizona in March and will travel across the United States before concluding in Los Angeles in August.
