One month after canceling the public on-sale for Taylor Swift’s “The Era’s Tour” due to not having enough tickets left, it has been revealed that Ticketmaster still have 170,000 tickets available for the tour. The company will be offloading the remaining tickets over the next four weeks using the platform Ticketstoday.
Ticketstoday was initially created 20 years ago for the Dave Matthews Band’s fan club platform before being acquired by Live Nation in 2008. The platform is still used today by bands like Phish and Ween. Ticketstoday is intended to cut wait times and avoid making fans wait in a queue.
On Monday, December 12, fans that signed up for the Verified Fan pre-sale began receiving email invites to submit purchase requests. If interested, fans can select a pricing option and provide their credit card information for a limited number tickets. There is a deadline to submit requests by Friday, December 23, and in the possibility that there are more fans wanting tickets than are available, a digital lottery will likely be held.
After canceling the public on-sale, Ticketmaster claimed 14 million people attempted to purchase tickets, but they had only planned for 1.5 million fans to. There are multiple congressional inquiries into Ticketmaster following the disastrous pre-sale and a group of Swift fans have also filed a lawsuit, alleging fraud, price fixing and antitrust violations. (Consequence)