Al-anwar Newspaper English news in Australia
Tickets for Adele’s shows in Australia were immediately being resold for more than $5,000 after they were released on Monday.
Tickets for the singer’s show at Perth’s Domain Stadium were on sale for $5,645.18 through Viagogo – more than 18 times the maximum ticket price of $308.77, with no guarantee of the seat number.
Reselling sites were offering tickets for $2,590.29 for the Adelaide and Melbourne shows, $1,946.29 for Brisbane and $1,349 for Sydney.
Adele’s tour of Australia, in February and March next year, was announced last week. The singers has attempted to circumvent scalpers in the past through the use of paperless tickets and has spoken out against the practice in public.
The Viagogo tickets – which were offered through the primary seller Ticketek for less than $310 – had been promoted to the top position on Google using Google AdWords, prioritising the inflated listings over the authorised ticket seller. This meant many people searching for tickets may have mistaken Viagogo for the authorised sites.
Fans shared their frustration as the websites of official agents struggled to cope with the demand. Many fans spent an hour or more trying and failing to get through, although some were successful.
Adele’s shows in Brisbane, Perth and Melbourne are at Ticketmaster-affiliated venues, and went on sale two hours earlier at 10am AEDT Monday. Tickets for the Sydney and Adelaide shows were being sold through Ticketek from 12 noon AEDT.
On Monday Ticketmaster announced a second show in Brisbane and a second in Melbourne.
There is extraordinary demand for the tickets to Adele’s Australian shows, the artist’s first tour of the country, and scalpers are taking advantage, using automated bots to buy tickets in large quantities at high speeds before flipping them at inflated prices on resale sites.
Some of these tickets available through Viagogo may have been legitimately purchased during presales offered to stadium members last week. But with the high quantity of tickets listed so early in the day, it is likely that many were listed for resale before they had even been bought.
