Did you get left out in the cold for Adele’s upcoming North American tour? You’re not alone.
The internet and social media nearly collapsed under the anguish of Adele fans nationwide on Thursday, as they tried in vain to order tickets for the tour, only to be left in ticket agencies’ online queues as the shows sold out. Fans lashed out on social media, complaining of the waits, with one disappointed fan complaining that she “just spent 3 hours of my life on a please hold waiting page.”
About the only silver lining was for online ticket brokers, who rode the law of supply and demand straight to the bank, ratcheting up prices for Adele tickets into the stratosphere.
While it might come as cold comfort, fear not: If you weren’t able to score tickets, you weren’t the victim of a technical glitch or an evil Anonymous hacker plot meant to deprive you of hearing Adele belt out “Hello” live.
“Our site didn’t crash,” a representative for Ticketmaster, which sold tickets for the tour at approximately 40 venues, told TheWrap.
The representative did say, however, that the agency “did have extraordinary demand that we haven’t experienced before,” with each date selling out within an hour.
By 7 a.m. on Thursday, 4 million-plus people were lined up to buy tickets through Ticketmaster, more than the company had available. With that amount of demand, the site did experience “a moment of slow performance.”
Overall, however, the Ticketmaster rep noted, “We’re happy to report that a lot of happy fans were successfully able to purchase tickets pretty quickly on our site.”
If you weren’t one of them, you might have to bite the bullet and pay the inflated price to a ticket broker. Or make fast friends with somebody who was able to score a ticket.