Childish Gambino fans are seeing redbone after tickets to the rapper’s recently announced Aussie headline shows sold out in minutes, only to reappear on Ticketmaster’s official resale site at double the price.
Tickets to the ‘This Is America’ star’s November tour went on sale at midday yesterday, with thousands of fans snapping up the Admit 1’s at breakneck speed. Sadly, it seems a whole bunch of vulture-like scalpers were amongst the successful buyers.
Plenty of fans were left empty handed after waiting in long cyber cues, only to soon notice “over 100” tickets appearing on the Ticketmaster resale site with seriously jacked up prices.
This is the internet, and it’s pissed.
Yet there’s already tickets on their own Resell website for more than face value… sure a “fan” realised they can’t go anymore minutes after buying tickets well done Ticketmaster on legalising scalping
— Georgina Fatouros (@gfatouros1) June 29, 2018
Yeah too bad you let people buy 10 at a time and sell them for $200+. You need to change the rules and your resale facility. Lots of people have missed out today because of this and aren’t willing to pay double the price. Not fair on artists or consumers.
— Alex Carpi (@alexcarpi747) June 29, 2018
Childish Gambino on sale at 12.
Refreshing till 12:01 for link.
Tried front stalls at 12:02, sold out.
Tried anything 12:03, sold out. Checked ticketmaster resale at 12.04, literally over 100 tickets for sale at more than double the price.
Unbelievable @Ticketmaster_AU— AllMyMusings (@AllMyMusings) June 29, 2018
Scalpers have also started hocking the tickets on Viagogo for even more insane price hikes, including almost $900 for GA at Gambino’s Sydney Opera House show.
SOH told customers there was an “extraordinary level of demand” for the tickets to the rapper’s shows there.
“We certainly understand the disappointment when fans miss out on tickets and we work very hard to make sure as many tickets as possible are available to fans and can be purchased as quickly as possible,” a blurb on their website read. “Allocation of tickets was exhausted very quickly.”
Meanwhile, in a statement sent to Fairfax Media in response to the outrage, Ticketmaster talked up the positives of its resale facility.
“Ticketmaster Resale is a safe and secure marketplace where fans can buy and resell tickets, with all purchases backed by our industry-leading fan guarantee,” the company said.
“Unfortunately there are always going to be some fans who can’t get hold of the most highly sought-after tickets when they first go on sale, and Ticketmaster Resale provides them with a chance to get hold of those most in-demand tickets.”
While they failed to explain their safeguards for preventing scalpers from abusing the system, Ticketmaster did mention the use of Verified Fan technology (a pre-approved identification system that offers users pre-sale opportunities) as one example of how they’re trying to combat the issue of scalping and bots.
“Ticketmaster does all it can to help artists get tickets into the hands of fans,” they said, “and we never place tickets on secondary market sites.”
Scalping has become an extra spicy issue in recent times, with NSW recently passing new legislation to make the practice illegal, after Victoria introduced huge fines for douchebags caught tickets a certain percentage above their original price.
But there are fears the legislation doesn’t go far enough to protect legitimate fans from being scammed.
Childish Gambino AKA Donald Glover will be in Australia later this year to headline Canberra’s Spilt Milk music festival, and earlier this week it was announced that he will also perform shows in Sydney, Melbourne and Perth.
Tickets to Spilt Milk go on sale from 12pm this Thursday, 5th July.
