TICKETMASTER APOLOGIZES TO SWIFTIES, DETAILS DIFFICULTIES
Ticketmaster issued an apology to the legion of Taylor Swift fans who had a tough time purchasing tickets to see their "Anti-Hero." The statement released late Friday also detailed the strategy behind the on-sale for The Eras Tour.
The platform's response arrived nearly 12 hours after Swift addressed her fans via Instagram, saying how the situation had "pissed her off."
Below are some of the bullet points from Ticketmaster's lengthy explanation. Read the entire post on their site.
We want to apologize to Taylor and all of her fans—especially those who had a terrible experience trying to purchase tickets. We feel we owe it to everyone to share some information to help explain what happened: https://t.co/1Gn4kRIvq8.
— Ticketmaster (@Ticketmaster) Nov. 19, 2022
WE KNEW A RECORD NUMBER OF FANS WANTED TICKETS TO TAYLOR’S TOUR
- By requiring registrations, Verified Fan is designed to help manage high-demand shows—identifying real humans and weeding out bots. Keeping bots out of queues and avoiding overcrowding helps make wait times shorter and on-sales smoother.
- Based on fan interest at registration, we knew this would be big. Over 3.5 million people pre-registered for the TaylorSwiftTix Presale powered by Verified Fan, which is the largest registration in history.
- Historically, around 40% of invited fans actually show up and buy tickets, and most purchase an average of three tickets. Around 1.5 million people were sent codes to join the on-sale for all 52 show dates, including the 47 sold by Ticketmaster.
- The remaining 2 million Verified Fans were placed on a waiting list on the small chance that tickets might still be available after those who received codes had shopped.
THE DEMAND FOR TICKETS TO TAYLOR’S TOUR BROKE RECORDS—AND PARTS OF OUR WEBSITE
- Historically, we’ve been able to manage huge volume coming into the site to shop for tickets so those with Verified Fan codes have a smooth shopping process. However, this time the staggering number of bot attacks as well as fans who didn’t have codes drove unprecedented traffic on our site, resulting in 3.5 billion total system requests—4x our previous peak.
- It usually takes us about an hour to sell through a stadium show, but we slowed down some sales and pushed back others to stabilize the systems. The trade-off was longer wait times in queues for some fans.
- Overall, we estimate that about 15% of interactions across the site experienced issues, and that’s 15% too many, including passcode-validation errors that caused fans to lose tickets they'd carted.
- All 2 million tickets for the Verified Fan on-sale were sold to Verified Fans. Only ticket buyers who were verified were permitted to enter a queue. Verification is tied to a user’s account and validated at login, which is why users only had to log in to enter the queue. For additional security, ticket buyers also had to enter their unique code to complete their purchase. No one who wasn’t verified was allowed to enter the queue, but the huge traffic hitting the site overall meant we had to slow down queues to keep them stable.
The statement when on to offer: "Even when a high-demand on-sale goes flawlessly from a tech perspective, many fans are left empty-handed... Based on the volume of traffic to our site, Taylor would need to perform over 900 stadium shows (almost 20x the number of shows she's doing)… That’s a stadium show every single night for the next 2.5 years. While it’s impossible for everyone to get tickets to these shows, we know we can do more to improve the experience and that’s what we’re focused on."
