Tickets for the 2023 Eurovision Song Contest went on sale at noon today through Ticketmaster. Within just over half an hour, the 6000 tickets for the grand final were sold out. Other live shows followed, leaving fans reliant on secondary markets.
Ticketmaster crashed as the sale started, and after this, many found themselves unable to progress beyond the ‘lobby’ area, with various error messages appearing on screen. The lucky ones who made the queue, at one point found themselves thrown out for non activity and lost their places. Those who tried to join the queue were logged out, and after logging back in found themselves trapped in a loop of screens saying to join the queue and being logged out, and then finding their passwords no longer worked.
The Grand Final showed ‘low availability’ by six minutes after the sale started and sold out at 12.34 local time. Within 90 minutes, all tickets for all shows were gone.
Tout
The official ticketing partner for Eurovision 2023 is Ticketmaster, which means that all tickets will be sold via their site, including any resale tickets. If you buy elsewhere, you’re unlikely to gain admission as the person booking will be named on the ticket and need to show proof of ID on arrival.
You can re-sell your ticket through Ticketmaster’s fan-to-fan exchange at face value. Tickets sold via any other outlet will contravene the terms and conditions and may be void. Ticketmaster’s ticket transfer function will not be available for this event.
None of this stopped scalping website Viagogo offering tickets for resale, with one ‘fan’ asking almost £12,000 for a general admission standing ticket.
So if you do have money to literally throw away, Viagogo is happy to take it off your hands. Ebay and Stubhub will doubtless offer a similar service shortly.
Business as usual
All in all, it was the predictable bun fight you might expect, and absolutely no different to last year, or the year before etc. And thus will it always be where demand vastly exceeds supply.
TICKET UPDATE: Grand Final #Eurovision2023 tickets are sold out. Demand is high for all other shows.
— BBC Eurovision (@bbceurovision) March 7, 2023
Been a fan since 1978, and I’ve turned my 17 year old daughter into a fan (we’ve been watching many of the national selection shows together). We’d booked a hotel near Manchester weeks ago (refundable) in the hope of getting tickets to the Saturday afternoon show.
Of course, I failed… it took me half an hour of continuously clicking on the “join queue” button to even get in the queue. An hour later, the blue progress bar had moved three quarters of the way across, but still 2000+ people in front – then the annoucement came that all had gone.
We tried not to get our hopes up, I kind of expected this to be honest.