Ticketmaster Pauses Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour Sale in France

Ticketmaster has as soon as once more cracked beneath the burden of a Taylor Swift ticket sale — this time in France.

As French followers ready on Tuesday to buy tickets to 6 live shows in May and June 2024 on Swift’s Eras Tour — 4 exhibits in Paris, two in Lyon — Ticketmaster’s web site displayed a huge queue of shoppers prepared to purchase; one screenshot appeared to inform a fan that 1,023,504 buyers have been in line forward of them.

Soon, Ticketmaster introduced that gross sales for these exhibits had been positioned on “pause.” The firm gave no rationalization, however stated {that a} new on-sale time can be introduced, and that “all codes not already used will remain valid.” But some followers’ social media posts appeared to indicate technical errors on Ticketmaster’s web site, together with a progress icon that “keeps spinning and spinning and spinning,” as one fan — talking English with an American accent, however with 762 euros’ price of tickets of their purchasing cart — put it.

Representatives of Ticketmaster and its company father or mother, the live performance large Live Nation Entertainment, didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark.

The scenario in France seemed to be a irritating repeat of the issues that plagued Swift’s North American presale in November, when an inflow of hundreds of thousands of followers — and bots — overwhelmed Ticketmaster’s programs, and followers reported points like tickets of their purchasing carts disappearing earlier than they might be bought. Ticketmaster shut down its public sale in consequence, although the corporate additionally stated it had bought greater than two million tickets to the tour in a single day.

Problems like these at Swift’s presale in November — in addition to long-simmering considerations over Ticketmaster and Live Nation’s market dominance — led to a brutal Senate Judiciary listening to in January. Senators from each events flatly known as the corporate a monopoly and have been skeptical of an government’s rationalization that Ticketmaster was unable to defend itself towards an onslaught of bots throughout Swift’s presale.

“This is unbelievable,” Senator Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee, stated on the listening to. “Why is it,” she added, “that you have not developed an algorithm to sort out what is a bot and what is a consumer?”

Yet the demand for Swift tickets has been extraordinary, with Swift promoting out arenas in all places she performs and tickets going for hundreds of {dollars} on the secondary market. She is scheduled to finish the North American leg of her tour subsequent month, then play in Latin America, Asia and Europe.

The Justice Department has individually been conducting an antitrust investigation of Live Nation. The Justice Department has not confirmed that investigation, however Live Nation’s chief government, Michael Rapino, has spoken about it brazenly.