Fancy a pair of tickets to watch Jay Chou in China? That’ll be $27,000
A pair of tickets for adjacent seats at Mandopop singer Jay Chou’s concert in Tianjin are reportedly being sold by scalpers for 150,000 yuan (S$27,400).
The concert, which takes place in the northern Chinese city over four days from Sept 7 to 10, was met with an overwhelming response with almost 130,000 tickets sold within the first 30 seconds when ticket sales opened on Tuesday, according to Chinese news outlet Global Times.
Tickets to watch Chou’s two-hour performance are priced at 500 to 2,000 yuan on China’s leading online ticketing platform Damai, and will also be sold on rival ticketing platform Maoyan on Friday.
Another scalper has advertised an asking price of 19,800 yuan for a ticket in the first-three rows of the VIP section.
A check on Damai’s ticket sale portal lists the same ticket at 2,000 yuan.
Fans of the Taiwan-born singer-songwriter, dubbed the King of Mandopop, are not the first to experience inflated prices and scalpers taking advantage of the overwhelming demand.
Tickets for Malaysian singer Fish Leong, Taiwanese band Mayday and Singaporean singer JJ Lin have been sold for exorbitantly high prices by scalpers.
Chinese netizens, in response, have called for more action to be taken by ticketing platforms such as tagging tickets to the buyers’ names.
Global Times reported that a similar situation in May when nearly 300,000 tickets for a six-day concert by Mayday were sold out in seconds. Fans at the time alleged that concert organisers had colluded with scalpers, but the organisers said the ticket buying process was open and transparent.
According to China Association of Performing Arts, box office revenue from performances reached nearly 16.8 billion yuan in the first half of 2023, a near seven-fold increase over the same period in 2022.
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