Adele fans outraged as Amsterdam show tickets near €5,000

With tickets already sold out for pop music artist Adele’s Amsterdam shows, the price to get into one of her concerts has skyrocketed as high as 4,950 euro on the secondary market. Ticket face value for the June concerts ranged between roughly 60 and 125 euro when they went on sale in recent weeks. The single seat priced at nearly 5,000 euro excluding service charge was found on ticket broker website Seatwave, a subsidiary of LiveNation. The company also owns Ticketmaster, the official ticketing agent for the concert. “Yes, [it is] scandalous and the true fan gets left out, I am not going to pay those amounts,” Adele fan Spekkie70 said on Twitter. Other fans similarly vented their anger about the price hikes, which often amounted to 40 times above the face value, and difficulty in getting tickets. Although the resale is not illegal, socialist party MP Jasper van Dijk calls it “totally bizarre,” and criticizes Ticketmaster for facilitating resellers, and earning revenue off both the original ticket sale and the resale, he told newspaper AD. Van Dijk was called for comment regarding a selection of four seats being sold on Seatwave for a combined 7,035.96 euro, or roughly 1,760 per ticket in a section that originally cost 124 euro. Members of the lower house of Parliament in the Netherlands, Tweede Kamer, approved draft legislation in 2008 to limit ticket resale price. The plan stalled in the Eerste Kamer, the upper house of Parliament, after the law drew criticism from industry experts. Adele is set to play the Ziggo Dome in Amsterdam on June 1, 3, 4 and 6.