Ticketmaster Says Taylor Swift Tour Chaos Necessary to Weed Out Bots

Ticketmaster is defining what failed with their Taylor Swift tour sales — and the validation for the mess was generally chalked up to … a necessary evil to defeat bots.

The Live Nation business posted an explainer Friday night, providing an extensive breakdown of why numerous individuals had such a tough time purchasing tickets to TS’s ‘Eras Tour’ throughout the presale window today … and it included both an apology and a defense of the chaos.

For beginners, Ticketmaster acknowledges what TayTay said … that she was informed they were expecting an extraordinary quantity of traffic and were prepared. However, TM includes that in spite of this … when the digital doors really opened, their expectations were gone beyond.

Ticketmaster published a chart that reveals simply the number of individuals (and not-real-people) flooded their website … despite the fact that they had a strenuous registration system in location to make certain genuine, verified fans were able to purchase tickets, as opposed to spammers who would otherwise snap them up wholesale and hawk them on the resale market with massive markups.

Regardless of this apparently airtight system remaining in location — including 3.5 million users effectively preregistering/confirming their IDs — Ticketmaster says that on the day of the sale, a lot more unregistered fans and bots came gathering in … partially crashing the site.

To solve this record quantity of traffic while concurrently looking after the folks who ought to’ve been ensured an opportunity to purchase passes … Ticketmaster says it began staggering lines, the outcome of which ended with longer wait times and, undoubtedly, annoyed users.

Ticketmaster says they understand this triggered confusion — and in many cases, individuals to lose their areas outright — however insists it was the very best choice under the situations. TM likewise happily promotes the reality 2.4 million tickets were, in reality, eventually offered to verified fans … which less than 5% of the tickets offered wound up for resale, a W in the website’s book.

Ticketmaster says it is sorry for the reality some were left empty-handed, however likewise includes this point of view … it’s impractical to please everyone, particularly at this level of interest.

TM says, “[B]ased on the volume of traffic to our site, Taylor would need to perform over 900 stadium shows (almost 20x the number of shows she is doing) … that’s a stadium show every single night for the next 2.5 years. While it’s impossible for everyone to get tickets to these shows, we know we can do more to improve … and that’s what we’re focused on.”