Gavin Rossdale, who is about to go on tour with his band, Bush, is weighing in on Taylor Swift’s recent Ticketmaster chaos.
When the presale for Swift’s “The Eras Tour” went awry on Tuesday night, Ticketmaster announced the following day that the public sale of tickets, which was meant to take place Friday, was canceled “due to extraordinarily high demands on ticketing systems and insufficient remaining ticket inventory.”
The announcement left Swift fans “deeply upset” by the announcement.
When asked by Fox News Digital on the American Music Awards red carpet Sunday evening about his thoughts on the incident, the Bush frontman said, “She’s so popular, I guess she crashed the server, which is a super high-class problem.”
“I don’t know what everyone is annoyed about. It’s exciting. Everybody wants to crash the servers,” Rossdale added of artists.
Gavin Rossdale doesn’t understand why people are annoyed amid the Taylor Swift Ticketmaster fiasco.
(Frazer Harrison/Getty Images)
SINGER GAYLE TALKS UPCOMING TOUR WITH TAYLOR SWIFT, TICKETMASTER FIASCO
Rossdale compared Swift crashing Ticketmaster to the time a speaker caught on fire during one of his performances in New Orleans. He mentioned his speaker, saying, “It’s our speaker on fire and Taylor Swift crashing Ticketmaster, two cool things.”
Greg Maffei, CEO of Liberty Media, previously explained on CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” that the presale was open to verified fans who were given a code that would grant them access to the sale. They were expecting around 1.5 million verified fans, however, the site was visited by closer to 14 million, with Maffei saying that the demand “could have filled 900 stadiums.”
Many fans complained they were stuck in the Ticketmaster queue for hours.
“Sitting in the Ticketmaster queue while it’s paused really has me wishing i never heard a Taylor swift song in my life and that i didn’t know who she was,” one fan wrote.
In their apology, Ticketmaster explained the high demand for tickets damaged the site’s ability to properly manage the sale.
“By requiring registrations, Verified Fan is designed to help manage high demand shows… Keeping bots out of queues and avoiding overcrowding helps to make wait times shorter and onsales smoother,” Ticketmaster explained. “Never before has a Verified Fan onsale sparked so much attention – or traffic. This disrupted the predictability and reliability that is the hallmark of our Verified Fan platform.”
Taylor Swift fans were left waiting for hours to get tickets for “The Eras Tour.”
(Kevin Winter/Getty Images)
The site also mentioned that 2 million tickets were sold during the presale, the most ever in one day.
After the cancellation was announced, resale ticket prices for many of the venues skyrocketed, with even the seats in the nosebleed sections selling for as much as $1,000 — with tickets at the very top of Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City, Missouri, going over $2,000.
Swift spoke out about the ordeal on Friday, saying that “it goes without saying that I’m extremely protective of my fans.”
“We’ve been doing this for decades together and over the years, I’ve brought so many elements of my career in house,” Swift continued. “I’ve done this SPECIFICALLY to improve the quality of my fans’ experience by doing it myself with my team who care as much about my fans as I do. It’s really difficult for me to trust an outside entity with these relationships and loyalties, and excruciating for me to just watch mistakes happen with no recourse.
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“There are a multitude of reasons why people had such a hard time trying to get tickets, and I’m trying to figure out how this situation can be improved moving forward,” she added. “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. 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.”
She concluded, “And to those who didn’t get tickets, all I can say is that my hope is to provide more opportunities for us to all get together and sing these songs. Thank you for wanting to be there. You have no idea how much that means.”
Fans were initially upset with Swift for staying silent about the fiasco. Swift finally spoke out on Friday, Nov. 18, 2022.
(Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic)
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Fans had previously expressed their frustration over Swift’s silence regarding the situation, with one saying, “@taylorswift13 staying silent through all of this speaks volumes. We’re all just a dollar sign.”
