Adele’s Tickets Went On Sale, Leaving Millions Of Fans Very Frustrated

It’s a good thing I am not a fan because I would probably be among all these very disappointed people! On Thursday morning, tickets for the Adele tour went on sale through Ticketmaster at 10 am, as it is often the case, and it was a disaster for some… Many complained to have been waiting for hours before failing to score a ticket. And I know the feeling too well, the frustration and the waste of time! When you finally give up after hours of refreshing the ticketmaster page, the only recourse is to complain on social media, and did they complain! Among many others, one of the best memes: ‘At least I can say I’ve tried’…. ‘One does not simply buy an Adele ticket, one just wastes days trying to do so’.

Here in Los Angeles, she is playing six nights in a row at the Staples center and it was almost impossible to get a ticket when they went on sale? How could this be possible? But it wasn’t only in LA, it was everywhere, 50 shows went on sale at the same time, causing the frustration of millions of fans.

Ticketmaster did not crash, according to a source at the firm, the site actually ‘performed very well’, but there was a truly unprecedented demand… As we know now, very few of the tickets are actually directly available to the fans, many tickets are hold by various sources, which considerably reduced the number of tickets on sale. According to a rough estimation by the Hollywood Reporter, 10 millions of fans tried to buy about 300,000 tickets out of possible 750,000 tickets, and this explains a lot. For example, 4 million people were online in the virtual queue at the same time to buy the seats for her New York shows, according to Billboard, and what can you do with a slow at-home-internet when you compete against some automated ticket buying ‘bots’ that use code to jump to the front of the virtual queue? Even though promoters pretend to have made an attempt to block automated purchases, it is a lie!

Here is a comment I have read, written by someone narrating his experience with ticketmaster:

‘Ticketmaster’s claim “did not crash and performed very well” is a big lie. I failed to get tickets at the Wednesday pre-sale for Adele’s website members (despite joining the queue at 10 AM on the second). I tried again on Thursday 10 AM and, after a long wait, managed to get two tickets to good specific seats. However, at the checkout, there was my order number along with a message claiming that ticketmaster had a problem processing my order and asked me to contact customer service with my order number. My wife, using a different service provider to get through, had the exact same problem even though she too got two tickets and an order number for a different day. Both of us have ticketmaster accounts with our credit card numbers on file. After 2 hours of trying to get through their busy line, the ticketmaster rep told us that both order numbers were not processed with our credit cards because the high volume had overloaded their processing and that someone else had gotten our tickets.

So it is colossal BS from this ticketmaster monopoly. It needs to be made more transparent and independently audited — or else its monopoly ended and go back to the fair old days of lining up for tickets.’

Of course you can now spot tickets for hundreds to thousands of $ on different reseller sites… But you have to really like Adele I guess.