Garth Brooks has canceled a Kansas City concert after bots swamped the ticket on-sale.
The show, a lower-bowl Saturday matinee on November 7 at T-Mobile Center, was added as a third date at the venue on October 21. Tickets went on sale through AXS two days later, on October 23.
The queue topped 90,000, according to a statement posted to Brooks’ website on Monday (October 26).
“Most of that number turned out to be bots,” the statement said, adding that AXS and the venue shut the sale down.
The bots held tickets throughout the floor and lower bowl, limiting fans’ access to those seats, Brooks’ team said.
The Kansas City matinee will not go ahead, and fans who bought tickets will be refunded automatically to their original method of payment.
Brooks’ two evening shows at the venue, on November 6 and November 7, are still scheduled to take place.
In the statement, Brooks said adding the matinee had been his idea.
He said social media posts and his history with Kansas City led him to feel that fans had been left without tickets after the original on-sale.
Brooks played nine shows at the venue in 2007, the year it opened as the Sprint Center, according to Kansas City TV station KSHB.
On the day of the sale, Brooks’ team announced on X that sales for the show had been stopped because of “excessive bot activity.”
The post went up around 35 minutes after the 10am CT on-sale, KSHB reported.
Brooks and the show’s promoters were deciding what to do next, the post added.
In a follow-up post, Brooks apologized to fans and said the bot problem had been “progressively getting worse on this tour.”
He said his concern was for fans who had bought Kansas City matinee tickets before the bots brought the sale down, and that he would look into the matter himself.
Later the same day, tickets for Brooks’ shows at Seattle’s Climate Pledge Arena went on sale through Ticketmaster.
Three shows sold out within minutes, according to Brooks’ statement.
With more than 30,000 people still waiting in the queue, he added a fourth show, a new opening night on November 12.
The statement said the Seattle on-sale broke Brooks’ own records for sellout speed and queue size, and took his ticket sales for the year past 500,000.
Brooks’ website listed every Seattle ticket at USD $155.50, including fees but before taxes.
There were no presales, and buyers were limited to eight tickets per purchase.
The Kansas City sale ran through AXS, which has been wholly owned by AEG since 2019.
Ticketmaster is owned by Live Nation.
It is not the first time Brooks has halted an on-sale on his Blame It All on My Roots Arena Tour.
On September 22, he shut down sales for a third show at Salt Lake City’s Delta Center after 30 minutes, citing bots, according to The Salt Lake Tribune.
That sale ran through SeatGeek.
Tickets bought before the shutdown were honored, and Brooks added a fourth Delta Center date.
At the time, Brooks called for bot activity during on-sales to be made illegal, if scalping itself was not going to be outlawed. “It’s just not fair for the REAL person,” he said in a news release quoted by The Salt Lake Tribune.
Brooks’ Kansas City cancellation is one of several bot-related on-sale problems reported by artists this month.
On Wednesday (October 28), Sam Fender postponed the presale for his two homecoming shows at Newcastle’s St James’ Park, citing a “sophisticated bot attack” on ticketing site Gigantic.
Earlier this month, Raye said scalpers had used AI bots to flood the presale sign-up for her Royal Albert Hall show, which drew 1.8 million registrations for 5,000 seats.
In the US, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and seven states sued Live Nation and Ticketmaster in September 2025 under the FTC Act and the 2016 Better Online Ticket Sales (BOTS) Act. The BOTS Act makes it illegal to get around the security measures ticket sellers use to enforce purchase limits, and to sell tickets obtained that way.
The complaint alleges that Ticketmaster knowingly let brokers use multiple accounts to buy past the ticket limits set by artists, then resell those tickets on its own resale marketplace.
In a court filing on October 13, the companies called the lawsuit “misguided” and said Ticketmaster had blocked close to 260 million bot attempts a day in 2025.
On Wednesday, Brooks also announced the tour’s first Canadian dates: two shows at TD Coliseum in Hamilton, Ontario, on December 4 and December 5.
Tickets go on sale through Ticketmaster on November 6.Music Business Worldwide
