Fans all over the nation followed steps prior to Tuesday to be considered “verified fans” in order to get special access codes for purchasing, and on November 15, the presale tickets went on sale at 10 a.m. local venue time.
However, shortly after the start of the sale, an innocent bid for concert tickets turned into an all-out war, as Ticketmaster began experiencing freezes and reported crashes on the website due to “historically unprecedented demand with millions showing up to buy tickets for the TaylorSwiftTix Presale,” Ticketmaster wrote in an update on Twitter. It added in the statement that “Hundreds of thousands of tickets have been sold.”
The ticketing service stated that West Coast sales in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Santa Clara and Seattle will be moved to 3 p.m. PT, and the Capitol One presale will be moved from Tuesday to Wednesday, November 16, at 2 p.m. local time.
Still, the process and the delays have angered Swift fans, who have made Ticketmaster a trending topic on Twitter while they express their outrage.
“8 billion people in the world and every single one of them is ahead of me in the Taylor Swift Ticketmaster queue apparently,” user @HereComesShawty wrote.
“When Taylor said ‘meet me at midnight,’ I wasn’t anticipating that meaning I’d be in the Ticketmaster queue until then,” another user wrote.
Netflix even responded in an apparent dig towards Ticketmaster after Pop Crave tweeted that the world’s population hit 8 billion people on Tuesday. “And they’re all waiting in a ticket queue right now,” Netflix wrote.
“When Taylor Swift wrote ’the great war’ she was actually preparing us for the Battle of Ticketmaster,” another user joked. “Her mind!”
With Ticketmaster trending high on Twitter, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted out her own calls against Ticketmaster.
On Tuesday, she wrote, “Daily reminder that Ticketmaster is a monopoly, it’s [sic] merger with LiveNation should never have been approved, and they need to be reigned in.
“Break them up.”
Ticketmaster merged with Live Nation, an events promoter and venue operator, in 2010, and it has long since been a system of concern, especially after Congress urged President Joe Biden in 2021 to break monopolies in America.
A spokesperson for Ticketmaster told Newsweek on Tuesday, “Millions of fans registered for Taylor Swift’s Eras Verified Fan Presale, with demand more than twice the number of tickets available––then on top of that millions more showed up to try to buy. This caused some delays for fans which we know is frustrating and we worked as quickly as possible to adjust some onsale times to manage the volume, and queues are now flowing.”
“The Taylor Swift tour is promoted by AEG and Messina Touring Group, not Live Nation,” they added. “The artist’s team chose to use Verified Fan because it is the most advanced technology in the industry to help manage demand and get tickets into the hands of fans - not bots. We thank everyone for their patience as we continue to work through the biggest onsale in history.”
Newsweek reached out to Ticketmaster and a representative for AOC for comment.
Update 11/16/22 11:05 a.m. ET: This article was updated with comment from a Ticketmaster spokesperson.
