THIS MORNING, THOUSANDS of U2 fans were left devastated as Irish dates for their upcoming tour sold out within minutes.
Tickets went on sale at 9am this morning for U2′s Experience and Innocence Tour which comes to Dublin’s 3Arena on three dates and Belfast’s SSE Arena for one date in November.
It’s understood that the tickets were sold out shortly after 9am this morning.
Almost immediately after tickets for all European dates of the tour went on sale on 9am, hundreds of tickets for dates in Germany, Portugal, France and the UK began appearing on Ticketmaster’s sister website Seatwave for up to €400.
As of shortly before 11am this morning, there were no tickets for any of the Irish dates available on Seatwave. However, some disappointed fans on social media this morning claimed that tickets were appearing on the site shortly after 9am.
https://twitter.com/ryan_boyle45/status/959356580436348928
Seatwave bills itself as a Ticketmaster company which allows fans who missed out on sold-out gigs to purchase official tickets. It allows fans to sell their tickets, even within minutes of purchase.
The company charges a 10% “success fee” on sales and allows people to set their own selling price. That means that the higher the price for “secondary market” tickets, the more money Seatwave stands to make.
[image alt="Capture" src="http://cdn.thejournal.ie/media/2018/02/capture-1111-296x298.jpg" width="296" height="298" credit-source="Screengrab" credit-via="Seatwave" caption="Tickets%20for%20U2's%20European%20tour%20dates%20appearing%20on%20Seatwave%20minutes%20after%20they%20sold%20out%20on%20Ticketmaster" class="alignnone" /end]
Fine Gael TD Noel Rock said that the legislation that has been introduced to tackle this kind of ticket reselling hasn’t moved fast enough and has called on the government to enact the legislation immediately.
“Today’s outrageous cornering of the market by touts whose only goal is to gouge hard-working fans is an absolute disgrace and shows clearly the problem we have here,” Rock said.
“This is now happening on a weekly basis with concerts big and small, as well as larger sporting events,” he said.
“This situation cannot continue. The ticketing industry cannot be relied upon to regulate itself.”
The extent of the problem is so great that artists like Ed Sheeran and Taylor Swift took action to make sure tickets to their gigs weren’t being bought for individuals to make a profit.
In July, Sheeran announced that he would recall 10,000 tickets that were up for sale on an unofficial ticketing site for inflated prices, and put them back up for sale on his own website for the original sale price.
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