Taylor Swift public ticket sale canceled over extreme demand, Ticketmaster says

Tickets for Taylor Swift’s “Eras” tour will no longer be put on sale to the general public Friday, after Live Nation’s Ticketmaster said there weren’t enough tickets to meet meet demand.

“Due to extraordinarily high demands on ticketing systems and insufficient remaining ticket inventory to meet that demand, tomorrow’s public on-sale for Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour has been cancelled,” Ticketmaster said in a tweet.

The company announced the cancellation hours after the CEO of Live Nation’s largest shareholder blamed a surge of demand from 14 million users, including bots, for site disruptions and slow queues for presales earlier this week.

The site was only supposed to be open to around 1.5 million verified Swift fans, Liberty Media chief Greg Maffei told CNBC.

Maffei said Ticketmaster sold more than 2 million tickets on Tuesday and demand for the superstar’s 52-date tour “could have filled 900 stadiums.”

Shares of Live Nation closed down nearly 3% Thursday.

Much of the demand for Swift’s stadium tour stems from the record-breaking release of her new album “Midnights” and the fact that the singer has not toured since 2018′s “Reputation” stadium tour. Her “Lover Fest” tour was canceled due to the pandemic.

The “Eras” tour is set to kick off March 17 in Glendale, Arizona.

Ticketmaster and Live Nation came under fire this week after activists and lawmakers suggested the company, which merged in 2010, should be broken up following a storm of glitches and site failures during the presales for Swift’s upcoming tour.

Legions of Swift’s fans took to social media to complain about the long wait times and confusion over “verified fan” tickets and presale codes. The verified fan program, which was established in 2017, was designed to keep tickets in the hands of actual fans and not resellers.

But, that didn’t appear to work in several cases. Within hours, tickets for the tour were already up for sale in the secondary market at exponential markups.

“Eras” tour tickets are priced from $49 to $450, with VIP packages starting at $199 and reaching $899. Secondary market prices can be seen ranging from $800 to $20,000 per ticket.

Representatives for Ticketmaster and Swift’s touring company, AEG Worldwide, did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.