Industry News

Touts beat system to sell Adele tickets for £9,000

Tickets to see singer Adele at Wembley Stadium are being offered for £9,000 ($11,400/€10,800) on exchanges despite the star’s efforts to prevent touts from profiteering from her concerts.

Viagogo and StubHub users were already advertising tickets at huge mark-ups before the official sale began on Friday for the London shows in June 2017.

Primary tickets were available through Eventim and Adele’s own website, with normal admission prices ranging from £45-£95, and golden circle access at £175.

The Guardian newspaper reported that Ticketmaster-owned GetMeIn and Seatwave had refrained from listing Adele tickets ahead of the open sale. It also said that an arrangement between Adele’s management team and Viagogo and StubHub had limited the number of tickets being resold to around 5,000, below what is normal for the most in-demand events.

Two tickets were available for £8,800 on Viagogo on Monday morning, although the site is not yet offering tickets for the two new gigs that only go on general sale on Wednesday.

Adele and her team last year worked with ticketing website Songkick to create a sales process that would limit the effect of reselling on availability and prices. More than 500,000 fans followed her request to pre-register on a website to qualify for tickets to her UK concerts in spring 2016.

Working with the ticketing website Songkick, Adele’s team identified accounts that they believed belonged to touts, and successfully de-registered around 18,000 of them before the UK pre-sale tickets became available. It is estimated that the process saved fans around £4m.

Adele was the biggest draw of 2016 in North America, according to a StubHub survey. The secondary marketplace said Adele led the way in terms of ticket sales on its site for concerts taking place this autumn, with Drake and Beyonce in second and third place respectively.

Posted in Industry News