Ticketmaster cancels Taylor Swift tour ticket sales due to ‘extraordinarily high demands’

The public tickets sale date for Taylor Swift’s highly anticipated The Eras Tour - scheduled for Friday - has been cancelled.

The cancellation is due to “extraordinarily high demands on ticketing systems and insufficient remaining ticket inventory to meet that demand”, Ticketmaster said on Thursday evening.

The Eras Tour will be the singer’s sixth tour. Fans are desperate to get their hands on tickets because Swift hasn’t been able to tour since 2018, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, but in that time she has released a number of chart-topping albums.

Pre-sales have already set a record, with millions showing up to buy tickets in “historically unprecedented demand”. Two million tickets were sold by Tuesday, Ticketmaster said, despite a “staggering number of bot attacks”.

“The biggest venues and artists turn to us because we have the leading ticketing technology in the world – that doesn’t mean it’s perfect, and clearly for Taylor’s on sale it wasn’t,” it said in a statement on Tuesday. “But we’re always working to improve the ticket buying experience.”

The company added that about 15 per cent of interactions across the site experienced issues.

Ticketmaster faced questions on Thursday from a US senator over its sales practices, after fans complained about website outages and long waits to buy tickets.

In a letter to Ticketmaster parent Live Nation Entertainment Inc, Senator Amy Klobuchar voiced “serious concern about the state of competition in the ticketing industry and its harmful impact on consumers.”

The Eras tour promises to include songs from all of her albums over the years, including her latest, Midnights.

So far, only the American leg has been revealed, but the official Taylor Swift website advises fans to “stay tuned for international updates”, which could mean a European tour some time in the future.

As it stands, the American tour is set to kick off on March 18, 2023, and wrap on August 5.

Swift earned a Grammy nomination on Tuesday for Song of the Year, for her 10-minute version of All Too Well.

It comes after the singer triumphed at the MTV Europe Music Awards (EMAs) over the weekend. On Sunday the megastar reigned supreme, winning four of the top gongs, including two for All Too Well.

Across her six nominations, she took home best video and best longform video award for the song, as well as best artist and best pop at the ceremony in Dusseldorf, Germany.