Back in mid-November, presale opened for mega pop star Taylor Swift's "Eras" tour. With 2 million tickets sold in one day, and pent-up demand due to her lack of tour dates since 2018, fans hustled to snap up tickets, crashing the Ticketmaster website.
Ticketmaster alleges it wasn't just fans trying to nab tickets, but also an unprecedented number of bots—most likely working on behalf of scalpers. Despite website glitches, 2 million fans got tickets for Swift concerts—"the most tickets ever sold for an artist in a single day," according to the company—and the general sale was subsequently canceled, as there weren't enough tickets left. Based on site traffic, Ticketmaster (which merged with Live Nation back in 2010 to create Live Nation Entertainment) calculated that Swift would have needed to play more than 900 stadium shows, or 20 times the number she is actually doing, in order to meet the extraordinarily high demand.
