Around 2,000 Madonna concert tickets to come back into circulation

Police unable to intervene in auction-house price gouging

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It appears that around 2,000 tickets for the sold-out concert by Madonna will be back up for sale in the next few days.
      Madonna is to make her first appearance in Finland on August 6th, playing an open-air gig in Helsinki's Jätkäsaari, in the West Harbour.
     
Most of the returns will be tickets in the standard C Section (general admission), but there will also be a few for Section B and the "Golden Circle" front-of-stage Section A, which were the most sought-after places when the total of around 80,000 tickets went on sale on Monday.
      The tickets will be dropping back into the system because some buyers bought more than the permitted maximum of six per head.
      Apparently this applies to some 300 to 400 customers.
      Exceptionally, the limit was also apparently imposed on company sales, thereby quashing rumours that hundreds of tickets had been swept up by firms as hospitality gifts.
     
If someone managed to order a dozen tickets, for example, they will be able to keep six of them, but the remainder will be withheld and their money will be refunded.
      It is unclear as yet just when the additional tickets will be up for sale, but it is likely to be in the next couple of days.
      The actual sale on Monday was hit by technical snafus, with some customers standing in line for hours only to be met with crashed computers that blighted their chances of getting the best places.
     
As often happens in these cases, tickets rapidly surfaced on online auction houses, sometimes within hours or even minutes of the box office opening, and are now being touted at inflated prices.
      For instance a pair of tickets for the coveted Section A were being sold on Tuesday for 1000 euros. The face-value of one such ticket was EUR 119.
      This gouging has prompted a strong reaction among disappointed customers, but police have said there is little they can do to intervene in the secondary market.
      The tickets do bear a text stating that resale is forbidden, but this is not based on law, and whilst the police acknowledge the immorality of the exercise, it is not a crime.
      On the other hand, the tax authorities might be interested in the windfall profits accruing from such deals.
     
Those desperate souls who did not buy before the general sale, either through the artist's own fanclub pre-sale arrangements or via the promoters' VIP club, and who then missed out altogether on Monday, nevertheless need not resort to paying hand over fist for a chance to see Madonna.
      Two days before the star comes to Helsinki, she is playing in Tallinn in Estonia, and it is expected that some 10-20,000 tickets for this gig will be reserved for Finland.
      Tickets for the Tallinn concert go on sale in March.


Previously in HS International Edition:
  Sales glitches once again a source of anguish as 80,000 tickets go in three hours (10.2.2009)

Helsingin Sanomat