Taylor Swift has broken her silence on this week’s Ticketmaster debacle, just as it was reported that the U.S. Department of Justice is investigating the company.
Ticketmaster said Tuesday its website was experiencing “intermittent issues” during a presale for Swift’s The Eras Tour due to “historically unprecedented demand” for tickets. It postponed sales on the U.S. west coast for three hours as it tried to resolve the issues.
On Thursday, the company announced it was cancelling Friday’s public on-sale “due to extraordinarily high demand on ticketing systems and insufficient remaining ticket inventory to meet that demand.”
In an Instagram Story on Friday, Swift said it is difficult “to trust an outside entity” and “excruciating for me to just watch mistakes happen with no recourse.” She said there are “a multitude of reasons why people had such a hard time trying to get tickets” and promised to “figure out how this situation can be improved moving forward.”
Swift said her team asked Ticketmaster “multiple times” if it could handle the demand “and we were assured they could.” She added that she is upset that some of the 2.4 million people who got tickets “feel like they went through several bear attacks to get them.”
The New York Times reported Friday that the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has been probing Ticketmaster’s parent company Live Nation for months to see if it is abusing its dominate market share. It cited unnamed sources and noted that a DOJ spokesperson declined to comment.
Earlier this week, Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti said he has launched an investigation into Ticketmaster after complaints from Taylor Swift fans.
Ticketmaster has deleted a statement about the fiasco from its website. It had read: “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. Even when a high demand on sale goes flawlessly from a tech perspective, many fans are left empty handed.”
The company said based on the volume of traffic to its site, Swift would need to play over 900 stadium shows – or one every night for the next two-and-a-half years.
“While it’s impossible for everyone to get tickets to these shows, we know we can do more to improve the experience and that’s what we’re focused on.”