At this point, the famed Midas Touch may as well be renamed the Adele Touch. After selling 30 million copies of her previous album, her latest release, 25, has been breaking records ever since it debuted, and the accompanying tour is one of the hottest things going. How hot, you ask? Last Thursday, 10 million people simultaneously attempted to buy one of the 750,000 tickets available to Adele’s U.S. tour from Ticketmaster, according to a Ticketmaster memo obtained by Billboard.
The tickets went on sale at 10 A.M. EST on December 17 and were sold out in minutes, with the six New York City shows selling out in less than a hour. The result of such an influx of Adelites (Adelians?) are jacked up resale prices and pools of tears from distraught fans who thought trying to buy tickets at 10:05 A.M. would be good enough. In less than a day there were tickets upwards of $11,000 on StubHub, with a floor seat at Seattle’s Key Arena being sold for $4,000.
Before the tour, Adele partnered with ticketing website Songkick to sell 235,000 tickets. In a move that will no doubt endear Adele to her legion of followers even more, the British singer was able to recover 53,000 of those tickets reportedly purchased by scalpers. Those tickets will be sold through AXS, Ticketmaster, and other ticketing services.
Even in 2015, thwarting scalpers is no easy task. Stuart Ross, a Red Light Management executive and tour director for Tom Waits explained to Rolling Stone how Adele’s team would go about getting those tickets back and identifying scalpers. “They’re going to go back to a buyer and say, ‘We’re canceling your order because you placed multiple orders, which is against our terms of service.'”
All of Adele’s valiant efforts may be for naught, however. Event ticket search engine and aggregator TiqIQ informed Digital Trends that tickets to Adele’s tour are currently selling for an average $919 on the secondary market. New York has the largest amount of tickets available on the resale market. Adele’s tour begins on July 5th at the Xcel Energy Center in St Paul, Minnesota.
Adele has been fighting against the norm even before her third album 25 shattered all records. In a recent interview with Time, Adele admitted personally doesn’t stream music and famously left her album off of streaming services because saying, “it’s a bit disposable.” That decision had zero negative effect on sales for 25 (and arguably helped the album sell better), which destroyed N’Sync’s 15 year 1st week sales record on its way to 3.38 million records sold in the U.S. in its first week.
Even Adele is surprised by all the love from the States. “It’s a bit ridiculous,” Adele told Time. “I’m not even from America.”
No, Adele, you are not. Neither were The Beatles.
