Singer Maggie Rogers won’t let bad guys ruin her upcoming concert tour. She just sent an email to her fans telling them she’s selling tickets for the show in a fancy, old-fashioned way – with in-person sales!
Fans of Rogers can get exclusive pre-sale tickets to her summer tour in the US next July and August. To do this, they must go straight to their local box office on Friday as that’s when tickets will be available. Fans are limited to buying two tickets per person but they can choose whatever kind they want – there’ll be lots of prices and tiers available, plus merchandise and a special playlist chosen by Rogers!
Rogers has said that the way to buy tickets in person may be different depending on where you live. To know more, check out her website! If you’re from the NYC area, she’ll be waiting at the Music Hall of Williamsburg box office in Brooklyn this Friday and will give people tickets for her show in Forest Hills taking place on July 27th.
If you miss out on Friday’s box office tickets, don’t worry! You can still buy pre-sale tickets from April 11th through the website. Spotify also has its own pre-sales starting on April 12th and there are other local distributors around then too. General tickets will be available on April 14th.
Joe Berchtold, the president and CFO of Live Nation, spoke in front of Congress back in January.
Recently, people have been really angry at Ticketmaster because it wasn’t able to stop bots from buying its pre-sale tickets and then reselling them for a lot of money. In November, 1.5 million codes were sent out to Taylor Swift fans who wanted to buy tickets, but 14 million people (including many bots) ended up trying to buy them. This caused Ticketmaster’s system to get 3.5 billion requests at once, so the website crashed and no one could get tickets anymore.
This topic caught the attention of US Congress, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who wanted to split up Ticketmaster. Joe Berchtold (President and CFO at Ticketmaster’s parent company Live Nation) spoke in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee in January. He said there was a problem, but he looked to Congress to sort it out – even though they’re not very good at sorting issues like this! The government hasn’t done anything about it yet despite investigation from Department of Justice and hearings with the Senate.
In December, a lot of people who had bought tickets to see the singer Bad Bunny in Mexico City weren’t allowed into the stadium. The tickets they bought were not valid and the Mexican authorities looked into the situation. In the end, Ticketmaster gave everyone their money back and extra money as compensation for what happened.
Rogers deserves recognition for his creative idea of solving a problem that exists in today’s technological world. The story focuses mostly on the difficulties of buying tickets with modern technology and not just about what he did to get around it.
