The odds of being able to purchase a ticket to Taylor Swift‘s upcoming tour during Ticketmaster’s presale this week were so low that a person would be more likely to survive being struck by lightning.
Presale tickets for the singer/songwriter’s Eras tour went on sale Tuesday, and a huge and unexpected demand for the tickets resulted in fans getting stuck in online queues for hours and Ticketmaster’s website crashing.
Even more fans ultimately left the online purchasing process empty-handed. As a result, the backlash against Ticketmaster on social media was overwhelming and some prominent lawmakers have condemned the ticketing company and its parent Live Nation Entertainment as a monopoly.
On Friday, Swift broke her silence about the fiasco that saw many of her fans failing to snag presale tickets for her first concert tour in five years.
“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,” Swift wrote in a statement shared on social media.
“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 said.
The presale for “verified” fans on Tuesday was only supposed to accommodate 1.5 million people. However, the chairman of Live Nation Greg Maffei on Thursday said during an appearance on CNBC’s Squawk on the Street that 14 million people attempted to purchase tickets on Tuesday.
Given the numbers cited of 2.4 million people buying tickets of the 14 million who reportedly tried to get them, the odds of success were less than 20 percent for those who attempted to participate in the presale.
Meanwhile, National Weather Service storm data shows only 10 percent of people who are struck by lightning are killed. That means that around 90 percent of people who are hit by lightning live through the experience. Thus, the odds of a human surviving a lightning strike are higher than the chances were of getting Swift tickets this week.
In a less grim statistics comparison, incumbent members of the U.S. House of Representatives running to hold on to their seats had a reelection rate this year of 94.5 percent, according to Open Secrets. Which means those members of Congress had a much higher chance of winning their races than Swift fans did of getting presale tickets.
Any Swift fans looking for tickets on the resale market this week were also likely met with only more frustration. Tickets selling on StubHub have been listed for upward of tens of thousands of dollars. In an extreme example, a pair of tickets on StubHub for the May 27 Eras show at MetLife Stadium in the New York-New Jersey Metro Area were recently listed at $76,221.
Newsweek reached out to Ticketmaster for comment.
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