Taylor Swift’s Concert Ticket Sales Plagued by Ticketmaster Delays

Ms. Swift’s 52-date run is slated to be her most extensive U.S. stadium tour to date. Fans who have received a code are supposed to have the chance to purchase tickets starting at $49 up to $449, with VIP packages running from $199 to $899 a pop.

Ticketmaster’s site became so overwhelmed in some markets that even fans looking for tickets to other concerts and sporting events were unable to make purchases.

The company said there is historically unprecedented demand with millions showing up to buy tickets for Ms. Swift’s presale. Ticketmaster said hundreds of thousands of tickets have been sold and told fans who are in lines to “please hang tight.” The company also pushed off West Coast presales from opening at 10 a.m. local time to 3 p.m.

Zachary Ring, 26 years old, said he had opened up the Ticketmaster site at 8 a.m. to get ready for tickets to the Pittsburgh show. He started getting nervous when the site crashed at 9:50 a.m. Almost two hours later, he was still waiting in line—with the dreaded “2000+ people ahead of you” screen.

He and another friend had received emails after purchasing signed CDs and exclusive vinyls from Ms. Swift’s website telling them that they would be boosted in line for tickets as a thank you for their purchases. On Monday, they received special codes and ticket links via text. But when they signed into Ticketmaster for the presale, they were never prompted to input their codes.

Verified Fan identifications, introduced and used by many top artists including Ms. Swift,

Bruce Springsteen

and

Ed Sheeran

in the years before the pandemic, is an attempt to ensure that actual fans, rather than scalpers, get first crack at tickets to hot events. For more than a decade the ticketing giant has waged war against professional resellers and the software “bots” they use to harvest tickets the instant they are available.

Verified Fan programs encourage fans to register weeks before tickets go on sale and ask them to provide their name, email and phone number. Ticketmaster doesn’t disclose the exact details of how the program works. But according to people who have worked on tours that used Verified Fan, the ticketing company mines its own sales records, along with publicly available data such as social-media history, to verify would-be buyers’ identities. Those deemed legitimate are sent codes that let them access tickets at a fan-only presale.

Ms. Swift’s newest album, “Midnights,” released last month marked her biggest debut yet, selling 1.58 million copies across formats in its first week, according to Luminate Data, formerly Nielsen Music. The album topped the Billboard 200 albums chart with the biggest sales week of the year. Its synth-driven songs, cheered by fans as stadium-tour-friendly, took every spot on the top 10 Billboard Hot 100 list for some time.

Fans have been speculating about how Ms. Swift will incorporate into her new Eras Tour all the music she has released since her Reputation stadium tour in 2018. LoverFest, a planned tour after the 2019 release of her “Lover” album, was canceled due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The pop star has since released a rerecorded version of her 2012 album “Red” as well as a pair of intimate acoustic-based albums “Folklore” and “Evermore.”

Several fans said Tuesday they should have been prompted for their presale codes before joining the line for tickets, rather than immediately before purchase, so as not to bloat the line with people that didn’t have codes.

Melissa Stewart, 31, said she had been fighting to get tickets for the Minneapolis show as soon as the presale opened. But after waiting more than an hour and a half in the line, her screen suddenly flashed with a notification that the sale had been paused.

“This has the same stress levels as the law school admissions process,” said Ms. Stewart, who graduated from law school this year.

A message that popped up on Ticketmaster’s site for many fans read, “We are currently experiencing technical difficulties and our team is working to resolve this as soon as possible. We apologize for the inconvenience and appreciate your patience. Please check back soon to continue.”

Ticketmaster competitor SeatGeek was selling tickets for the tour’s shows in Arlington, Texas, and Glendale, Ariz., also via Verified Fan. SeatGeek changed its website landing page to automatically put anyone who goes to it in line for tickets to the Eras tour.

Verified Fan generated controversy as soon as big artists started using it broadly around 2017. Fans who are unsuccessful in obtaining tickets or even codes have become livid, feeling snubbed by software that purports to quantify their enthusiasm for a given artist. Meanwhile ticket brokers—the term resellers prefer to scalpers—say the process interferes with free-market dynamics.

At the time, Ticketmaster touted the benefits, saying fewer than 5% of tickets sold through Verified Fan end up being offered for resale on sites such as StubHub or through brokers’ own sites.

Jon Rose, 50, said he, his wife and his office manager had all teamed up unsuccessfully to try to get tickets to the Philadelphia show for his 16-year-old daughter.

Due to dynamic pricing—which adjusts ticket prices in real time based on demand—the tickets they had identified at about $300 the day before were $600 by the time his office manager got through, he said.

Mr. Rose said his wife, a high-school teacher, had the ticket site open on a second computer monitor all morning—and that many of her students were on their phones trying to do the same.

“I feel like we were prepared for this,” said Mr. Rose. “It shouldn’t be this hard.”

Write to Anne Steele at [email protected] and Ashley Wong at [email protected]