Dive Brief:
- Ticketmaster’s outages during the Taylor Swift presale resulted from overwhelming demand and unprecedented traffic, according to a statement released Thursday.
- More than 3.5 million people pre-registered for the presale, the largest registration in company history, and of those 1.5 million were invited to participate in the sale and 2 million were placed on the waitlist, according to the statement. Ticketmaster said usually around 40% of those who receive invites for presale show up to buy tickets.
- Ticketmaster’s website struggled to keep up with demand. “Unprecedented” traffic from bots and those who did not receive invite codes resulted in 3.5 billion total system requests, four times the amount of system requests than the company’s previous peak, Ticketmaster said.
Dive Insight:
In total, more than two million tickets were sold on Nov. 15 — the most tickets ever sold for an artist in a single day, the company said. Ticketmaster estimated that around 15% of interactions across the website experienced issues.
For angry fans, the company’s statement is not likely to do a lot of good. Social media has been flooded with posts from fans that did not get tickets or had a poor experience.
The company said that, based on the volume of traffic on its site, Swift would have needed to perform over 900 stadium shows for every fan to get a ticket.
For regulators, the outage has served as a reminder that Ticketmaster's 2010 merger with Live Nation led to fewer avenues for fans to buy tickets, which adds to the bottleneck.
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-NY, tweeted about the event saying, “Daily reminder that Ticketmaster is a monopoly, its merger with [Live Nation] should never have been approved, and they need to be reigned in.”
Senator Richard Blumenthal, D-CT, Representative David Cicilline, D-RI, and others joined the call for action against the company. Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti said in a press conference he would be investigating Ticketmaster for possible antitrust violations on Wednesday, Bloomberg reported.
Ticketmaster canceled the public ticket sale scheduled for Friday citing high demand with insufficient remaining ticket inventory, the company said Thursday in a tweet.
