Ticketmaster cancels 6,200 bot-purchased Lowlands Festival tickets; To be resold Saturday

Ticketmaster has cancelled the sale of 6,187 tickets for this summer’s Lowlands Festival after it was discovered that they had been purchased by ticket-buying bots. The bots were used to snap up the tickets in bulk with the sole purpose of reselling them at a much higher price, festival organizers said on Facebook.

The tickets will be “offered again and for the original price to genuine Lowlanders” when they are resold by the organizer starting on Saturday, February 10th at 11 a.m. A maximum of 2 tickets can be purchased per person. Purchases can be made on the Ticketmaster website.

This year, tickets cost 325 euros, and they sold out in less than 15 minutes. At one moment, there were about 130,000 people waiting in a digital queue to make a purchase. They sold out just as fast last year, but Ticketmaster’s position as the exclusive ticket seller for Lowlands has been controversial.

The company was under fire last year for not doing enough to prevent what Parliamentarians called the “extortionate” resale market for Lowlands tickets. Last year, tickets were priced at 300 euros. They could then be marked up through Ticketmaster’s own resale platform by another 20 percent. A second purchase through its resale site meant the company could again charge its own service fees a second time.

It pushed the price of Lowlands tickets on Ticketmaster’s own resale site upwards of 400 euros. Both Ticketmaster and Lowlands organizer MOJO are under the same U.S. parent company, Live Nation.

This year, Ticketmaster is again the only official ticket seller for Lowlands, the festival said. Again, a resale option will be available through Ticketmaster from March 18. Also from that date onwards, it will be possible to transfer a ticket to someone else free of charge via Ticket Transfer.

The Lowlands Festival will take place from August 18 - 20 in Biddinghuizen, Flevoland. The festival features a wide range of music, art, and theatrical performances.