When my time is finally up on this planet of ours, and I descend to my final resting place, I hope to see a special place reserved for the most egregious sinners of them all — the people behind ticket websites.
For the benefit of the offline community, yesterday was the day Beyoncé finally announced the hotly anticipated Renaissance world tour — her first tour in seven years.
As someone who identifies as a Beyoncé fan first and a human being second, both brain and body kicked into overdrive — there less than 24 hours between the announcement and the pre-sale at 10am the following day.
The first hurdle: my best friend couldn’t make any of the London dates. A tough one, but I am more than capable of making difficult decisions: she had to be left behind. I pressed on.
Come 10am, I was highly caffeinated, with 10 Ticketmaster tabs open, and my morning Zoom meeting mere white noise crackling into the abyss (sorry to my boss if you’re reading this). This was not my first rodeo. A One Direction fangirl back in the day, I’d been training my whole life for this.
Then the second, devastating hurdle: with minutes to go, the whole website crashed. A sensation overcame me that I can imagine is mirrored only by an adrenaline-fuelled mother finding the superhuman strength to lift a car from a trapped baby. It was pure primal mania. I frantically switched from screen to screen, refreshed like my life depended on it, and screamed at my boyfriend to get off the wifi — I needed every megabyte I could get.
Across the internet, hoards of fans were having the same experience, unable to access the website and being redirected back and forth, to no avail. By the time I got into the virtual ticket queue, and there were 66,000 people in front me, I knew London was off the cards.
“Maybe if I just MOVE somewhere else, like permanently, it will financially balance itself out?”, I think I actually said out loud. You’ve never truly known desperation until you’re weighing up house prices in Warsaw vs Sunderland to start your new life based purely on the likelihood of seeing Beyoncé. I even considered applying for a job at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium (they’re hiring, if you were wondering).
This is not the first time desperate fans have been let down by ticket websites either. In November last year, when Taylor Swift announced her Midnights tour, 14 million fans logged on for Ticketmaster’s presale. Those who got through ran into numerous malfunctions, some being told to wait hours to be able to spend hundreds of dollars on seats. The website then said, a few days later, that it would not even be selling tickets to the general public.
Harry Styles fans suffered a different but similarly frustrating fate in September, when Ticketmaster implemented a surge-pricing system based on demand, meaning tickets were close to an average of £330.
At this point, we might as well scrap all these ticket-punter sites. They are clearly not fit for purpose. The fairest solution is probably to just put us all in a room and let us fight it out — at least then we’d see who really wants it badly enough.
You’ve probably gauged by now that no, I didn’t get Beyoncé tickets. Instead, here I am. Mining my villain origin story for your enjoyment.
But fear not, there is still the general sale. Beyhive: we go again tomorrow.
