I’ve been meaning to do a write up on this, but kept putting it off. There’s a real reason as to why tickets to Beyoncé’s upcoming world tour are so hard to come by and Naomi Zeichner over at the Fader Magazine, does a good job explaining how backhanded the business of Ticketmaster, StubHub, scalpers and the artists themselves, are.
Touching on how many tickets were actually available for sale the day they were made available for the Mrs. Carter World Tour @ Barclay’s Center in Brooklyn, NY:
It’s impossible to know. Because Barclays, like most of the arenas where big artists play, is privately managed, they do not share how many tickets were allotted to each group, or how many were left for the public on-sale. According to an investigation of this January’s Justin Bieber show at Nashville’s public Bridgestone Arena, on the day tickets went on sale to the general public, fans were competing for only about 10 percent of the concert’s seats. If that same ratio applied to Beyoncé’s Barclays date, then fewer than 2,000 tickets would have been available during the pulic on-sale.
Yes a bulk of it can be blamed on pre-sale and scalpers but even the artists have a hand in scalping their own tickets.
Similarly, according to Dean Budnick and Josh Baron’s 2012 book Ticket Masters, Beyoncé placed sought-after tickets for past tours on TicketMaster’s TicketExchange site, selling them at premium prices and, in doing so, essentially reclaiming the inflated profits typically earned by scalpers and professional brokers.
Head over the Fader for more details on the waste land of big concert ticket sales and hopefully tips on how to possibly, maybe, just might…secure your own tickets at the original listed price.
Over here in the UK, the majority of her tickets were sold on a pre-sale to people on a certain network provider 🙁 This meant on the actual sale date she sold out in about 10 minutes…cue hysterical screaming from me when the 5 screens I had up all told me she was sold out! The first and last time I try to buy tickets to see an artist. Ill just stick to YouTube.