LiveNation's (NYSE: LYV) TicketMaster received backlash last week after the company announced that tickets for Taylor Swift's "Eras" tour will not be available for purchase due to extremely high demand and lack of supply to meet it.
"Due to extraordinarily high demands on ticketing systems and insufficient remaining ticket inventory to meet that demand, tomorrow's public on-sale for Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour has been cancelled," Ticketmaster wrote in a statement on Twitter.
The New York Times reported that TicketMaster said in a post that 3.5 million individuals have enrolled in the Verified Fan program. Out of those 3.5 million people, 1.5 million were either offered special access codes or placed on a waiting list. "Never before has a Verified Fan on sale sparked so much attention--of uninvited volume," Ticketmaster said.
The announced cancellation came hours after the head of Live Nation's largest shareholder blamed a surge in demand from 14 million users for site disruptions and slow queues for presales, CNBC reports.
Ticketmaster and Live Nation came under scrutiny last week after antitrust and consumer rights activists and lawmakers suggest that the company should be broken up following the technical problems it faced from the untick in demand for Taylor Swift tickets.
Tennessee attorney general Jonathan Skrmetti announced last thursday that he is looking into whether Ticketmaster violated consumers' rights and antitrust regulations by canceling the the ticket sales.
"Ticketmaster's decision to cancel sales underscores the important need for accountability. Fans deserve a fair chance to buy a ticket. I'm encouraged by other state AGs who are taking this issue serious as well," Skrmetti said in a statement.
The tour will essentially focus on Taylor Swift's latest album release of "Midnights." It will be her first tour in four years, and many government officials have addressed issues in terms of the collaboration between TicketMaster and Live Nation, which both unified back in 2010.
Taylor Swift actively spoke out against this issue on social media. "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," Taylor Swift wrote in a post on Instagram (NASDAQ: META). "It's truly amazing that 2.4 million people got tickets, but it really pisses me off that a lot of them feel like they went through several bear attacks to get them."