On Tuesday, European fans logged onto the Ticketmaster site to buy Taylor Swift concert tickets—and saw that over 1 million other fans were ahead of them in the virtual queue. The Swifties were vying for spots at the pop star’s six Eras Tour concerts in France slated for June 2024.
Soon, the site traffic got so high that Ticketmaster simply stopped sales with no explanation, saying that they had been placed on “pause” and that a different sale time would be announced later. All of the tickets already purchased at the time of the pause were still valid. According to fans on social media, the Ticketmaster site seemed to have technical problems, with the webpage freezing with a loading icon and not allowing shoppers to buy the items already in their cart.
“The onsale date and time for Taylor Swift The Eras Tour in France is being rescheduled and tickets are still available,” Ticketmaster France tweeted on Tuesday. “This morning’s sale was disrupted by an issue with a third-party provider and they are working to resolve this matter as soon as possible.”
Ticketmaster did not immediately respond to Fortune’s request for more details about the issue with the third-party provider.
This isn’t the first time Ticketmaster has fumbled selling Swift’s tickets. The venue canceled a sale of tickets for the North American leg of the tour in November 2022.
“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 tweeted in November.
The Eras Tour, Swift’s first worldwide tour in five years, has set records for Ticketmaster traffic en route to becoming a bona fide cultural phenomenon. In November 2022, when Ticketmaster had to cancel a public sale, it told the New York Times that it had received 3.5 billion system requests in one day. The tour has become such a landmark cultural and economic event that fans are paying over $20,000 resale for a seat. The singer, who’s won 12 Grammy Awards, generates so much spending in her tour destinations that analysts have even coined her economic boost as the “TSwift Lift.” She is pulling down over $13 million per night, and the entire tour is projected to bring in over $1 billion, Bloomberg reported.
Recurrent problems with Ticketmaster’s sale of Eras tickets doesn’t just highlight Swift’s wild popularity—it reveals flaws in the dominant ticket outlet’s business. Part of the problem is that Ticketmaster, owned by Live Nation Entertainment, occupies most of the ticket selling market, so fans have little other choice but to suffer its millions-long queues and Sisyphean loading screens.
Ticketmaster was even subject to a Senate judiciary hearing in January, in which senators from both sides of the aisle dunked on the company for cornering the market, specifically citing its inability to deal with Swift’s presale.
“This is all the definition of monopoly,” Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) said at the hearing. “Live Nation is so powerful that it doesn’t even need to exert pressure. It doesn’t need to threaten. Because people just fall in line.”
The Justice Department is also reportedly conducting an antitrust investigation into Live Nation.
Swift will complete her North America leg of the Eras Tour next month, and then will continue to Latin America, Asia, and Europe, concluding in London in August 2024. She just might bring crashing Ticketmaster sites around the globe wherever she goes.
