Ticketmaster has cancelled its planned public sale of tickets to Taylor Swift’s latest tour after a whirlwind few days that demonstrated not only Swift’s extraordinary fan following but the limitations of music’s dominant ticketing system.

“Due to extraordinarily high demands on ticketing systems and insufficient remaining ticket inventory to meet that demand,” Ticketmaster announced on Thursday, “tomorrow’s public on-sale for Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour has been cancelled.”

The public sale, planned for Friday, was for any tickets left over from the week’s presales. Ticketmaster gave no indication of whether any more ticket inventory was left to sell. The chaos began on Tuesday when Swift’s tour — her first in five years — began the first of several tiers of “presales” for fans through Ticketmaster’s Verified Fan programme, which is designed to weed out bots and speculators in favour of customers that are determined to most likely be actual fans. Millions of fans were locked out.

In a later-deleted blog post by Ticketmaster on Thursday, the company said that 3.5 million people registered for the Verified Fan programme, and around 1.5 million were given a special access code and “invited” to the sale for Swift’s tour, which is scheduled for 52 dates in North America starting in March. The remaining two million verified fans were put on a waiting list.

Ticketmaster said it received 3.5 billion system requests that day, four times its previous peak. Two million tickets were sold on Tuesday alone. “Never before has a Verified Fan on sale sparked so much attention — or uninvited volume,” the company said. Fans were also frustrated by tickets being resold on sites like StubHub at markups of up to tens of thousands of dollars.

The news of Friday’s ticket cancellation frustrated Swift’s fans, known as Swifties, who had complained of technical difficulties, hours long wait times and failures to secure tickets during the Verified Fan presale. That programme required fans to preregister with Ticketmaster, selecting their preferred tour date and location and providing personal information.

Multiple Swift fans said they rearranged their schedules to accommodate the sale on Tuesday morning, including taking the day off work, rescheduling a meeting and a high school student who skipped school with her mother’s permission. A representative of Swift did not respond to a request for comment.

(New York Times News Service)