By Sam Whyte
TICKETS for Madonna’s concert at Murrayfield on Saturday are selling for less than face value on eBay – or not at all.
Despite the pop superstar telling fans to “start saving” when the show was announced, it appears there could be empty seats in the stadium.
Some 60,000 seats are available for the only Scottish date of her MDNA tour, which is Madonna’s first performance north of the border in her 30-year career.
The cheapest tickets were put on sale for the official price of £60 plus a £6 booking fee.
But rather than being a sell-out, hundreds of tickets are being sold on eBay for as little as £37 each. Others remain unsold having failed to reach their reserve price.
One seller from Strathclyde was offering two tickets together worth £134 but failed to make a sale yesterday (tue) after bidding stopped at £63.
Another seller, from Dunstable, Bedfordshire, was selling three tickets with a combined face value of £231 but received just £111, an average of £37 each.
A London fan sold two tickets with a combined face value of £240 for just £108.
Cut-price
Today, a pair of tickets was for auction at the starting price of 1p but, with six hours to go, had no bids, despite the seller having 100% feedback.
Despite the flood of cut-price Madonna tickets, some fans continue to have wildly inflated expectations. One was offering a pair of tickets for £850 which remained unsold today.
Official ticket sites still have hundreds of tickets available.
Viagogo, a ticket-selling agency, struck a deal in February with Madonna’s promoter, Live Nation, to be the official “premium and secondary ticketing partner” for the MDNA tour.
The site has 9 pages of tickets for sale with a starting price of £150 each.
The website of another ticket agency, Seatwave, still has tickets for seats in the south stand at Murrayfield ranging in price from £99.50 to £235.
Despite having sold 300 million records worldwide, music critics believe the 53-year-old is being overtaken by acts such as Lady Gaga, Rihanna, Lana Del Rey and Jessie J.
Peter Robinson from website Popjustice said the poor sales are down to Madonna’s lack of popularity with younger people who are “bored of pop”.
He said: “You might look at her imagery and think ‘I’ve seen it all before’ but the only reason you’ve seen it before is because Madonna did it in the first place.
“If you’re bored of the woman who gave the world True Blue, Like a Prayer, Hung Up and Ray of Light you’re bored of pop.
“At the same time tickets aren’t cheap, pop fans are fickle, you’re as big as your last hit and Madonna’s last hit got to number 73.”
“Toutfest”
Music critic Colin Somerville said: “I’m not sure whether someone like Madonna, who is essentially a disco act, is suitable to play in a huge stadium like Murrayfield.
“I don’t think people want to pay those kind of prices for a show that has no sense of intimacy or personal experience.
“You also have to consider that she is doing the tour off the back of a not particularly successful album and has also lost that aspirational status that she once had.
“I’m not sure people really want to see their granny in fishnets singing on stage.”
Derren Nugent, spokesman for the music website www.safeconcerts.com, claimed Madonna had created a one-woman “toutfest” by allowing a batch of tickets to go on sale on Viagogo’s website, but that the move had now backfired due to poor sales.
Viagogo said it would not discuss the “confidential” details of its contract with Live Nation for Madonna’s tour.
Edward Parkinson, director of London-based Viagogo, said: “We are officially endorsed by the organisers of the tour as the place where fans should go to sell-on their spare tickets and to buy tickets once sold out at the box office.”
Concert promoters Live Nation refused to comment, as did her publicist Barbara Charone.
Mistake
It emerged today that a mistake by Ticketmaster, the official outlet for tickets, led to hundreds of fans printing off tickets for free.
The winner of a competition for free tickets passed on the web link intended for competition winners only on a social networking site.
Ticketmaster said: “This was a genuine link for competition winners set up in conjunction with the concert promoters Live Nation.
“There were a limited number of tickets for those who won, however, we think a lucky winner posted details of the link on to Twitter and it has went round pretty quickly.
“It is unfortunate that people have taken away tickets from genuine competition winners. The link has now been shut down.”
