photo credit: grant ruof
It was a chilled, dreary early morning, and millions of people around the United States are seated, ready with every device they own, watching as time slowly ticks by, slowly edging closer to the awaited time. Sept. 9 was a treacherous day that left the majority of Ariana Grande’s fans devastated and ticketless.
Grande finally announced an Eternal Sunshine Tour that would occur in summer 2026 after not being on tour since her Sweetener Tour ended in late 2019. While this is very joyous news for many Ariana Grande fans, including myself, there are a few problems.
Grande is mostly performing in arenas which hold around 20,000 at the maximum. One of the stadiums she is performing at, Barclay Center in Brooklyn New York, has a max capacity of 19,000 people and while she is performing at this city for five shows, it doesn’t account for the almost three million people that signed up for just her presale for this city, according to source.
This fact wouldn’t be a problem if she wasn’t also only performing very few shows. She is touring in nine cities in the United States, none of which are Ohio sadly, and two more cities which include Quebec and London. She is performing a total of 41 shows, some which were added during presale and then quickly sold out in minutes. So all of these factors, plus the fact that about six million people signed up for just her presale tickets, made it very difficult for anyone to get tickets.
Usually someone’s first thought after not getting tickets in general or presale to an artist would be to see if there are any resellers. Luckily, for Ariana Grande’s fans, there seemed to be more resellers than people actually going to the concert. But this of course led to nosebleed seats that are not even facing the stage to be $800 and also to be considered a steal. This is where people are faced with one of the main roots of the problem not only Ariana Grande fans face, but also fans of many different artists face: Ticketmaster and its policies.
For the reselling of tickets on Ticketmaster, a reseller can sell it for any price they want. So if a reseller buys a $200 ticket for a pretty mediocre seat toward the back, they could sell it for $1,000. This might sound like a large exaggeration, but resellers actually do resell tickets six or seven times the original price of the ticket.
And of course Ticketmaster gets around 10-15 percent of the amount that the ticket is sold for a seller fee, according to NPR. And even if a reseller wants to sell a ticket at face value, they have to list their ticket.
Another thing is that not only is Ticketmaster greedy, it’s downright gluttonous. When a person buys a ticket off of Ticketmaster, the original price can be increased by over $150 plus for service fees and payment processing fees.
But when it comes to specifically Grande’s ticket sale, Ticketmaster isn’t only to blame: it’s also her own team.
For some artists, presale tickets are very exclusive and hard to earn access because it’s supposed to take place before the actual general sale. For example, artists like Sabrina Carpenter had an exclusive code sent to people signed up for presale and was only given to maybe a couple of thousand people for her Short and Sweet tour.
However, the presale for Ariana Grande was very different; all someone had to do was sign up for the presale link on her website and they could choose three of her shows to have the chance to get the presale on.
For the presale tickets, people were also allowed to choose six tickets maximum per person, which is complete insanity since most artists only allow up to a maximum of four tickets so letting each person by six per person would just let the venue sell out quicker. All of these factors combined made it almost impossible for almost anyone to get tickets to Ariana Grande.
Currently, Ticketmaster and their parent company, Live Nation Entertainment, has a monopoly over all live events and concerts. Because of this, Ticketmaster is able to treat their customers unfairly and make them pay more money than they should have to. Having another competitor company for Tickemaster would not only allow fans to be able to get their favorite artists tickets at more affordable prices but also make it easier to be able to buy them as well.
