Taylor Swift’s ‘Eras Tour’ Breaks Records With Over 2 Million Tickets Sold In A Day

Taylor Swift has made a much-deserving comeback after a 5-year hiatus from live performances. On Tuesday (Nov. 15), Ticketmaster crashed over 5000 times amid an “unprecedented demand” for Taylor Swift. Now, Ticketmaster has come forward with a lengthy explanation s to why it happened. It has come out that the website sold more than 2 million tickets during the Verified Fan pre-sale, a reason which led the site to crash multiple times. 

Ticketmaster Cancels General Ticket Sale

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 (@Ticketmaster) November 17, 2022

That’s the kind of impact Taylor Swift has on her fans worldwide. According to Ticketmaster, over 2 million tickets for Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour were sold on Tuesday (Nov. 15), breaking the record for most single-day sales. This became a major reason for the site to crash over 5000 times on the pre-sale day.

The sad news is that if you haven’t purchased the tickets to Taylor’s concert, the chance might have gone. After an “unprecedented demand” for Eras Tour tickets, and a sale of over 2 million tickets through Ticketmaster’s Verified presale on Tuesday, the ticketing company announced Thursday (Nov. 17) that a “planned general sale for all other customers has been cancelled”.

“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,” read a tweet posted to the official Ticketmaster account.

 CEO Greg Maffei Explains The Chaos…

In a recent interview with “CNBC”, Liberty Media CEO Greg Maffei (Liberty owns part of Live Nation, Ticketmaster being its subsidiary), blamed the chaos on “massive demand” for Swift tickets. “The site was supposed to be opened up for 1.5 million verified Taylor Swift fans,” he mentioned.

Greg further explained that “We had 14 million people hit the site — including bots, another story, which are not supposed to be there — and despite all the challenges and the breakdowns, we did sell over 2 million tickets that day.”

The ticketing company released a statement, wherein it mentioned that over two million Verified fans got sent to a waiting list and 1.5 million were given the chance to buy tickets when the sale started. This split was decided because “historically, 40% of invited fans actually show up and buy tickets, and most purchase an average of 3 tickets.”

“Historically, working with Verified Fan invite codes has worked as we’ve been able to manage the volume coming into the site to shop for tickets,” Ticketmaster said. “However, this time the staggering number of bot attacks, as well as fans who didn’t have invite codes, drove unprecedented traffic on our site, resulting in 3.5 billion total system requests — 4x our previous peak.”

Ticketmaster added, “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 long wait times in queue for some fans.”

Ticketmaster initially denied it had any trouble with its site, “the site is not down” and “people are actively purchasing tickets,” but later came forward to address the issue. Many fans complained about being locked out for hours.