Tickets to see Taylor Swift in concert sold out so quickly on Ticketmaster that most people still need to buy them.
Thursday, Ticketmaster, the company selling tickets to the singer’s US tour, stopped selling them to the public. It said that the demand for tickets was very high and that there needed to be more tickets left.
It has already pre-sold more than two million tickets to specific groups.
People have said bad things about the company after the demand crashed its website.
The company said that a “staggering number of bot attacks” and high demand were to blame for the problems. Since she first came out in 2006, Taylor Swift has had a steady stream of hits.
The company said that more than 3.5 million Swifties, which her fans are called, had already signed up as “verified fans.” In hopes of getting tickets for her 52-city US tour before it went on sale to the public.
On Tuesday, November 15, these one-of-a-kind fans went on sale.
People with a credit card from Capital One, the company that is paying for the 52-city tour, could buy tickets before the general public.
Even though there were problems during the pre-sale that Ticketmaster said affected about 15% of all site interactions. The company said it still sold more than 2 million tickets, the most tickets ever sold for an artist in one day.
Thursday, Ticketmaster said that the public sale scheduled for Friday would not happen.
Ticketmaster says that the pre-sale system will stop bots and people who sell tickets for a lot of money from getting seats.
But the problems with the process have made people angry again. The public has accused the company of abusing its power over the industry for a long time.
Democrats criticizes Ticketmaster
Earlier this year, on an episode of his HBO show Last Week Tonight. John Oliver, a British comedian, said that Ticketmaster is “one of the hated companies in the world.” He said it was to blame for how expensive concerts are, the cost, and how hard it is to get tickets.
Pearl Jam talked about how worried they were that Ticketmaster was the biggest ticket seller in the 1990s.
Since then, the company has only grown stronger. It bought Live Nation in 2010, which runs a lot of the country’s event venues and has a business that manages artists.
US Democratic lawmakers spoke up again during the chaos of the Taylor Swift pre-sale.
On Wednesday, the Department of Justice did not answer a request for comment about Taylor Swift.
The government already keeps an eye on Ticketmaster, and put more oversight in place when it approved LiveNation purchase.
A few years ago, regulators found that the company had broken the terms of the agreement. So they made the oversight last longer.
And last month, US Vice President Joe Biden expressed his worries about the monopolies in the economy. He also said that his government would consider whether concert tickets should have fees.
The top policy analyst at the American Economic Liberties Project is Krista Brown. She is part of a group of artists and other people working together to break up Ticketmaster.
She said she hoped that Taylor Swift’s many angry fans would pressure the government to do something.
But it needs to be clarified if that will help fans who didn’t get to see Taylor Swift in concert get over their disappointment.
