Following days of fans calling on her to speak now, Taylor Swift has released a statement on the chaos Swifties faced while trying to buy tickets to her upcoming tour.
After the "Verified Fan" presale went down in flames Tuesday, fans had been silent and patient, pining, and desperately waiting for their idol to address the Ticketmaster glitches that left many unable to get tickets.
That finally happened on Friday, with Swift saying in a statement posted to her Instagram story that she, too, is a mad woman.
"I'm not going to make excuses for anyone because we asked them, multiple times, if they could handle this kind of demand and we were assured they could," she wrote.
On Thursday, a day before tickets were to go on sale for the general public, Ticketmaster announced the sale was being canceled "due to extraordinarily high demands on ticketing systems and insufficient remaining ticket inventory to meet that demand."
In a blog post Thursday — which was deleted hours later — Ticketmaster said that a "record number of fans" had tried to buy tickets during Tuesday's highly exclusive "Verified Fan" presale, which fans had to sign up for in hopes of being selected for access. More than 2 million tickets were sold Tuesday, they said, the most ever sold for an artist in one day.
But even the lucky ones with presale access struggled to get tickets. Many were stuck in Ticketmaster's queues for hours — and for those who actually made it through, many were told their codes were invalid and lost out on tickets as a result.
Ticketmaster said the issues were due to "the staggering number of bot attacks, as well as fans who didn’t have invite codes drove unprecedented traffic on our site." It said about 15% of users experienced site issues, but did not say how it was defining what counted as an issue.
In her statement, Swift said she has "brought so many elements of [her] career in house" in order "to improve the quality of my fans' experience by doing it myself with my team who care as much about my fans as I do," she said.
"It's really difficult for me to trust an outside entity with these relationships and loyalties, and excruciating for me to just watch mistakes happen with no recourse," she wrote.
"It's truly amazing that 2.4 million people got tickets," she wrote, "but it really pisses me off that a lot of them feel like they went through several bear attacks to get them."
"And to those who didn't get tickets, all I can say is that my hope is to provide more opportunities for us to all get together and sing these songs," she added. "Thank you for wanting to be there. You have no idea how much that means."
Jack Antonoff — who has collaborated with Swift on many of her albums, including the recently released Midnights — also got into his vigilante shit Friday, criticizing Ticketmaster in several thinly veiled subtweets (plus one where he simply called Kanye West "a little bitty little bitch").
"touring is one of the most honest ways to make a living. some of the hardest and most heartfelt work you can do. so why must fuck artist so hard?" Antonoff tweeted.
In the days since the ticketing fiasco, Ticketmaster has faced a rising wave of accusations that the company could stand in violation of antitrust laws, echoing activists' claims that the company became a monopoly following its 2010 merger with LiveNation. Even before the disastrous presale, the Department of Justice had opened an antitrust investigation into the company, the New York Times reported Friday. (The DOJ declined to comment on the matter to BuzzFeed News.)
"Daily reminder that Ticketmaster is a monopoly, it’s merger with LiveNation should never have been approved, and they need to be reigned in. Break them up," Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted Tuesday.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal called the ticketing chaos "a perfect example of how the Live Nation/Ticketmaster merger harms consumers by creating a near-monopoly."
"I’ve long urged DOJ to investigate the state of competition in the ticketing industry," Blumenthal tweeted. "Consumers deserve better than this anti-hero behavior."
On Thursday, Sen. Amy Klobuchar sent a letter to the head of Live Nation Entertainment, Ticketmaster's parent company, expressing "serious concerns about the state of competition in the ticketing industry and its harmful impact on consumers."
"Ticketmaster’s power in the primary ticket market insulates it from the competitive pressures that typically push companies to innovate and improve their services," Klobuchar wrote. "That can result in the types of dramatic service failures we saw this week, where consumers are the ones that pay the price."
