Swift says Ticketmaster's mishandling of presale for her concert tickets 'excruciating' to watch

Singer Taylor Swift said Friday the mishandling of the online ticket sales for her upcoming tour has been "excruciating" to watch.

Though she didn't name Ticketmaster, she clearly put the blame on the company, which became so overwhelmed by ticket requests by Thursday that it had to stop a public sale the next day.

It "goes without saying that I'm extremely protective of my fans," Swift said in an Instagram post Friday. "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.

"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. 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."

Ticketmaster said Thursday that its public sale of the tickets would be canceled the next day as a result of "extraordinarily high demands on ticketing systems and insufficient remaining ticket inventory to meet that demand."

The cancellation was for tickets expected to be left over from a presale, which started Tuesday for members of a Verified Fan program.

Fans earlier this week experienced technical glitches and long wait times, resulting in many not being able to purchase a ticket.

Part of the problem reportedly is that Ticketmaster didn't or couldn't provide enough special access codes for those in the verified program with the number of registrants reportedly reaching 3.5 million.

Public officials were quick to call for answers. Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti, for example, said Wednesday that his office received "a number of complaints" and the matter needs to be looked into.

"We know that consumers were given pre-sale codes to purchase tickets, and we need to look into exactly what was promised them and whether that was provided," said Skrmetti, according to local TV station WKRN.

"We're looking at a company with an extremely dominant market share — I've heard it may be up to 70% of the concert venue ticket sales," he told reporters on a Zoom call. "Any time you have that kind of concentration of market share, there's the risk that the lack of competition will not just drive up prices for consumers; it will also reduce the quality of the product."