Taylor Swift fans have been given a second chance to secure tickets for the singer’s Eras Tour, with reports of those having signed up to Ticketmaster’s Verified Fan programme receiving notifications that tickets are available.
Billboard has reported that users of the Verified Fan programme – which is Ticketmaster’s attempt at squeezing out bots and verifying that buyers are genuine buyers – have been informed that a new window for ticket sales would be opening soon.
Ticketmaster faced unprecedented demand for tickets during the pre-sale for Taylor Swift’s upcoming tour, with fans experiencing outages and extremely long wait times.
The Live Nation-owned ticketing platform explained that two million Verified Fans were sent to a waiting list and 1.5 million were offered the chance to buy tickets when the sale started.
However, an extreme number of bot attacks and fans without invite codes drove unprecedented traffic on the Ticketmaster site, resulting in 3.5 billion total system requests.
Ticketmaster subsequently cancelled the general sale due to low inventory.
The issues with the Taylor Swift pre-sale debacle resulted in a number of calls from US Senators on the break-up of Live Nation and Ticketmaster.
Fans were also angered as tickets started appearing on resale sites for extremely inflated prices. Some fans also turned to legal action against Ticketmaster for the issues securing tickets.
A blog post with questions and answers from Ticketmaster said that fans had been notified yesterday (Monday) via email of the opportunity to purchase tickets, with invitations staggered by tour dates in each city.
The post said: “You were identified as a fan who received a boost during the Verified Fan presale but did not purchase tickets. We apologise for the difficulties you may have experienced, and have been asked by Taylor’s team to create this additional opportunity for you to purchase tickets.
“All fans receiving this opportunity were notified via email on Monday, December 12. Notified fans will receive their individual invite to submit their purchase request prior to Friday, December 23. Invitations will be staggered by tour dates in each city.”