Not long after the artist’s “Most Wanted” 2024 tour presale started on Wednesday, fans were criticizing the high ticket prices on social media. Prices for seats in the nosebleeds were $150-$250 on Ticketmaster, depending on the city and before fees, according to people who shared their experience on TikTok. In Miami, a 100-level ticket was $750. Prices for floor seats were even higher, with some reporting $1,000 per ticket. One screenshot from a fan showed tickets starting at $1,482 for floor seats at Barclays Center in New York City. Fans buying tickets in the presale were also required to purchase four tickets at a minimum.
This can’t become the new normal. We desperately need a concert revolution and to stand up against corporate greed. Fans need to band together and stop buying tickets when they’re overpriced like this. And many Bad Bunny fans did.
She pointed out in another TikTok video that there were plenty of presale-priced tickets still available well after the sale had started — a contrast to presales for Swift, Beyoncé or Drake, which sold out quickly. More affordable tickets in higher tiers were gone, but floor and 100-level tickets were still available, possibly indicating that even scalpers weren’t buying them because of the high prices. She says when she checked back Thursday morning, prices hadn’t dropped and the same amount of tickets were available, which made her think dynamic pricing wasn’t the issue here.
“Normally I’d place blame on Ticketmaster, but I think this is beyond that. This is before the fees and everything,” Vergara said. “They do dynamic pricing where it goes up as people join the queue, but people got these prices as soon as they joined, so it seems like it is Bad Bunny’s team at fault here.”
Bad Bunny’s representative did not respond immediately to a request for comment. A representative of Ticketmaster responded to our query about Bad Bunny’s ticket prices, and directed HuffPost to its site’s explanation of “ticketing truths.” Under a question about who sets the ticket price, Ticketmaster says “the artist team sets face value ticket prices.”
“Let’s say this is Bad Bunny negotiating these prices. This is still a Ticketmaster problem that they’d allow an artist to exploit the people that make his career, and this is the worst part of a corporation and a monopoly,” Kinder told HuffPost. “The consumer gets exploited and what ends up happening is that the only people who can experience art in the U.S. are rich people, because they keep art from you and I.”
“You really don’t know who you’re buying the ticket from. You don’t know if you’re buying an original presale ticket or if it’s on the resale market because it’s Ticketmaster, and you really never know unless you saw the Bad Bunny contract … or he came out and said something,” Kinder said.
This content was originally published here.