10 Million People Tried to Buy Tickets for Adele’s U.S. Tour
Approximately 10 million people attempted to purchase Adele tickets when they went on sale Thursday, that according to a Ticketmaster memo that was sent to employees after ticketless fans lashed out at the ticketing service when the singer’s 2016 U.S. tour quickly sold out.
“I know it must be frustrating to read or see in the news that we crashed during Adele’s onsale and that fans are upset with [Ticketmaster] because they couldn’t get tickets,” Ticketmaster president Jared Smith wrote in the memo that was obtained by Billboard. “Unfortunately, when there is such a exceptional artist with unprecedented demand against short supply, there are inevitably going to be disappointed fans.”
The bottleneck for Adele tickets was highlighted by the singer’s six-night stand at New York’s Madison Square Garden, where an estimated 4 million people vied for the roughly 100,000 available tickets to the series of concerts. After languishing in Ticketmaster’s waiting room, the majority of those fans went away empty-handed as the six shows sold out in under an hour, a source told Billboard.
However, Smith denied that the onslaught of traffic also impaired the site’s stability and prevented fans from acquiring tickets. “Please know that your progress in the area of site stability and abuse prevention are making an indelible mark on our company’s position as the global leader in live entertainment,” Smith wrote.
In some cases, fans were frustrated by the lack of Adele tickets available on secondary ticket sites like StubHub, with the singer’s team partnering with Songkick to resell tickets in a way that didn’t gouge fans thanks to scalpers’ inflated prices. “We’re sorry there aren’t more #AdeleTickets avail but she has restricted the distribution. If you grab seats w/ us you can count on those,” StubHub’s official Twitter wrote Thursday after the quick sellouts left fans scrambling for other options.
However, the Songkick deal is credited with saving European fans nearly $6.5 million in inflated ticket fees.