Taylor Swift Says She’s ‘Not Going To Make Excuses For Anyone’ In First Statement About Ticketmaster Mess

Topline

In Taylor Swift’s first statement since Ticketmaster canceled the general admissions sale of tickets for her upcoming “Eras” tour, the singer said she was assured by the company it could handle the intense demand for her shows before she hired them, and she is angry that a lot of fans “feel like they went through several bear attacks” to get tickets.

Taylor Swift accepts an award onstage during the MTV Europe Music Awards 2022 held at PSD Bank Dome … [+] on November 13, 2022 in Duesseldorf, Germany.

FilmMagic

Key Facts

Swift said there are “a multitude of reasons why people had such a hard time getting tickets” and is working to improve the situation going forward.

Swift said she “isn’t going to make excuses for anyone” because her team asked “them”—presumably Ticketmaster and Live Nation—multiple times “if they could handle this kind of demand and we were assured they could.”

She did not mention either company by name.

Swift said it’s “truly amazing” that 2.4 million tickets were sold, and she hopes to “provide more opportunities” to those who couldn’t get tickets “for us to get together and sing these songs.”

Crucial Quote

“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,” Swift said, noting she’s brought many elements of her career in-house “SPECIFICALLY to improve the quality of my fans’ experience by doing it myself and with a team who care as much about my fans as I do.”

Key Background

Tickets for Swift’s “The Eras” tour first became available for presale on Tuesday. Ticketmaster’s site crashed, and fans experienced extremely long waits to get seats. Ticketmaster said it experienced “historically unprecedented demand” for the North American tour, which has over 50 shows scheduled. Live Nation chairman Greg Maffei put the blame on Swift’s fan base Thursday, saying the issues were “a function of the massive demand Taylor Swift has.” While the site was set up for 1.5 million “verified” selected fans to get pre-sale tickets, 14 million users tried to purchase them, including bots, Maffei said. On Thursday evening, before general admission tickets were supposed to go on sale Friday morning, Ticketmaster canceled the sale, because of “extraordinarily high demands on ticketing systems and insufficient remaining ticket inventory to meet that demand.” Ticketmaster has fallen under fire from politicians like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) over antitrust concerns following the Swift sale, and the Tennessee attorney general said it’s probing the company to see if consumer protection laws were broken.

Tangent

Hype for Swift’s tour is especially high because it’s her first concert since 2018. She’s released four new albums since then, including Midnights, which was released in October.

What We Don’t Know

It’s not clear how the remaining tickets for the tour will be sold, if there are any left.