The CashApp presale for Kendrick Lamar and SZA’s “Grand National Tour” started on Wednesday (Dec. 4), and fans had plenty to say about the difficulties of scoring tickets. Between long wait times, queues, and outrageous service fees, many of them blamed Ticketmaster, and the company, surprisingly, responded.
Underneath the ticketing giant’s Twitter post, someone claimed, “You will let the brokers in with good accounts due to your algorithm [and let them] get all the good or cheap tickets.” However, the company denied those allegations: “This is false.”
“We never prioritize brokers over fans,” Ticketmaster added. “In fact, we have invested more than the rest of the industry combined in developing technology to block bad actors from stealing tickets from fans.” Still, that didn’t stop some social media users from venting their frustration.
The general sale for Lamar and SZA’s upcoming trek will begin on Friday (Dec. 6) at 10 a.m. local time. The “Grand National Tour” is expected to make stops in Houston, Atlanta, Charlotte, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, St. Louis, and Toronto before officially wrapping up on June 18 in Washington, D.C.
The tour announcement came a bit over a week after Lamar’s GNX release and, hopefully, not long before SZA finally drops her highly anticipated third studio album, LANA.
Bots and ticket resellers have been a huge issue, especially in music, throughout the past few years. In fact, Live Nation and Ticketmaster were both sued by the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) in May for running an alleged monopoly at the cost of “fans, artists, smaller promoters, and venue operators.”
“Live Nation relies on unlawful, anticompetitive conduct to exercise its monopolistic control over the live events industry,” Attorney General Merrick B. Garland told NBC News. “The result is that fans pay more in fees, artists have fewer opportunities to play concerts, smaller promoters get squeezed out, and venues have fewer real choices for ticketing services.”