Almost 12,000 pre-sale tickets for the British band Coldplay's Singapore concert were sold out in just one hour after going on sale on Thursday morning at 10 am, the concert organiser Live Nation Lushington said.
The upcoming concert, which is scheduled on April 1, 2017, will be Coldplay's fourth event in Singapore. The prices for the tickets were going at $78, $128, $168 and $268 via Sports Hub Tix. Limited VIP tickets were also available for a whopping price of $298. Standing tickets were also available but only to those aged 12 and above and were priced $128 and $228.
The pre-sale tickets for Citibank cardholders will be available from Thursday to Saturday till 11.59 pm, while the presale tickets for subscribers to the Live Nation Lushington mailing list will go on sale on Sunday from 10 am to 11.59 pm. As scheduled earlier, public sales will go on Monday from 10 am.
The organizer said 12,000 to 14,000 tickets will be available across all ticket categories on each of those two days.
Live Nation Lushington also said that another 10,000 tickets might be released after that. It will discuss all the pending production and layout issues with Coldplay's production team.
Michael Roche, the managing director of Lushington told The Straits Times that on Thursday, 80 percent of the allocated tickets had sold out within 30 minutes of the sale. He said nearly 5,000 to 6,000 users were trying to make transactions at any one time.
He termed this situation as "unprecedented" and said: "the only other time this happened was when Michael Jackson played in Singapore for the Dangerous Tour in 1993".
Some 80,000 to 100,000 concertgoers attended the sold-out two-day concert of Michael Jackson.
Reports showed that scalpers started selling the tickets at 10 times the cost price after a few hours of the first batch of pre-sale tickets. Some tickets went up to $3,150 for Category 1 tickets, which are originally priced at $268.
Several sites such as mobile e-market platform Carousell and resale ticket website Viagogo, both had listings selling the concert tickets. Many of those were with marked-up prices.
One seller on Carousell cited inability to attend "due to a work trip scheduled after purchasing the tickets" and sold nine consecutive Category 3 tickets, each originally priced at $128 each.
The Sports Hub Tix event page had a ticket restriction listed as "4 tickets for CAT 1 per transaction".
In response to these, Roche said he is aware of the reselling of tickets and assured that his team would contact all the reselling platforms. They would ask them to take down the listings.
The organizing team is also prepared to bar people with resale tickets from entering the concert grounds.
