Something disturbing happened this week… Garth Brooks tickets for the Calgary Stampede sold out in 58 seconds. Yes you heard that right… disturbing.
The Calgary Stampede announced Country Superstar Garth Brooks as one of their headline acts, and tickets went on sale Saturday morning and all 15, 322 were gone in less than one minute! What’s disturbing is that tickets originally priced at $62, showed up mere moments later on Ticket reseller sites like Stubhub and Ticketfast (some of which are owned by Ticketmaster), for up to 4000 dollars! Most fans were shut out, unable to even log into Ticketmaster site to begin with and they vented on social media – Garth Brooks was trending Canada wide on Twitter.
Canadian Country singer Craig Moritz spent much of the day speaking out against ticket scalping on his Facebook page. He believes concerts should be affordable to everyone, but that online ticket services are getting in the way.
According to the Edmonton Journal, Stampede organizers were thrilled with the sellout – of course! Why would they not be? The ones that suffer of course are the fans… Garth Brooks ‘people’ did not respond to any media inquiries but for sure they’re pleased at the sell out as well.
One day perhaps, an artist with enough clout, like Brooks (or like Springsteen did a few years back) WILL speak out against this ‘legal’ scalping practice – made harder to swallow by the fact that the very scalpers are subsidiaries of the original ticket seller! Disturbing, unfair and just plain wrong.