Olivia Rodrigo’s fans have been waiting to buy tickets to her highly anticipated debut “Sour” tour but after selling out quickly, tears are flowing all around the world. Her tour is set to begin in April in San Francisco, and she will headline concerts in more than 40 cities throughout North America and Europe. Tickets went on sale earlier in the day for her UK and Europe concert dates and reportedly sold out in three minutes.
As noted by the Sacramento Bee, there was a verified fan registration for her North American tour dates through Ticketmaster where people could sign up for what was essentially a lottery to purchase tickets. But all hell broke loose Friday once they went on sale at 10 am as fans were left with messages of “technical difficulties” on the website. Some were able to get through outages and into a waiting room but many were left behind queues of thousands of people to no avail. Less than an hour later resellers posted the sold-out tickets on StubHub. The average ticket price to see her on tour was $155 and resellers have been posting them to stub hub for hundreds to thousands of dollars.
Rodrigo is undoubtedly 2021’s breakout star and her song “Driver’s License” was the top song streamed globally on Spotify, so it‘s no surprise the tickets sold out quickly. What’s unfortunate is the number of people who bought them just to resell them at a higher price. Depending on the location of the concert, tickets are on sale for no less than double the price, and that’s without Stubhub‘s service fee.
In San Francisco, the lowest tickets for general admission are $549 at the time of this publication and they are going fast. SFGate reported that someone even had them listed for $9000 this morning. Right now the highest price is $2,222, so the greedy seller might have removed his listing until the rest of them sell out at a lower but still ridiculous price.
Plus, the high numbers are just the ticket price because StubHub has its own service fee on top of it, which is close to the price of her original tickets. Per SF Gate, StubHub states that its fees “vary depending on event type, ticket type, and location” and can be changed “in its sole and absolute discretion.”