Hello, pissed Adele fans. If you were one of the many who tried to get a ticket to one of Adele's upcoming shows yesterday and failed, you were not alone. There was a virtual stampede on Ticketmaster's window when tickets for Adele's North American tour went on sale in the morning. Fans faced hour-long wait times to get tickets—if they got tickets at all. The (lack of) results left fans furious at Ticketmaster.
According to Ticketmaster, this was not their fault. "[Ticketmaster] did not crash and performed very well, in spite of truly unprecedented demand," a source said according to Billboard. The source added that the systems encountered some of the heaviest traffic it had ever seen and sold out its roughly 40 shows in under an hour.
It seems as though Adele fans were set up for failure. The 25 singer has already sold over five million albums and could sell nearly six million in its first month. Adele is playing 50 arena shows in the U.S., which reportedly equals a total inventory of an estimated 750,000 tickets. Taking the ticket industry into account, Billboard guessed that pre-sales, VIP, and various ticket holds likely decreased that total by two-thirds ultimately leaving "tens of millions of fans trying to purchase what was probably less than 300,000 tickets available."
According to an insider, four million people were in the virtual queue at the same time for the six NYC shows that sold out in less than an hour. Really, it was the gaping hole between supply and demand that left all of us clicking 1,000 times before crying on our keyboards like Adele at her saddest.