Mahalo for supporting Honolulu Star-Advertiser. Enjoy this free story!
Whatever happens when tickets for the second Bruno Mars show go on sale this morning, one thing appears certain: A good many people will not be happy.
There’s precedent. Thousands of local fans complained in 2014 when an online free-for-all resulted in 42 percent of tickets for Mars’ three-night stand at the Blaisdell Arena being sold to people outside the state. Only 6 percent of tickets went to people standing in line at the box office.
Just last week 36,000 tickets for Mars’ Nov. 10 show at Aloha Stadium sold out in just over two hours, leaving scores at the Aloha Stadium box office disappointed and thousands online at home fuming over a range of real and presumed injustices, including the role of out-of-state bots that circumvented restrictions designed to ensure that local fans got a 48-hour head start on buying tickets.
Tickets for the second Mars show on Nov. 11 are again being offered exclusively to local buyers for the first 48 hours, but few are expecting them to last that long or for secondary-market sellers on the mainland not to once again flout the rules to secure blocks of tickets.
As of noon Friday some 700 people had converged on Aloha Stadium hoping for a better shot at securing tickets for the second show, prompting stadium officials to close the line and advise people not to bother coming down because latecomers had virtually no chance at getting tickets. By late afternoon, with the start of ticket sales still some 18 hours away, tensions were already running high among tired, irritable fans crowded within the stadium’s south concourse.
Queue the fans
Many in line had tried unsuccessfully to buy tickets to the first concert.
“I didn’t think it would be hard because he’s playing in a bigger venue this time,” said Summer Vith, 47, of Mililani. “But when I tried, using three different devices at the same time, I couldn’t get through.”
To make sure that she’d be able to get tickets for herself and her kids, Vith said she planned on camping out at the box office a day early — until she caught a glance of how desperate fans had become.
“I drove by on Wednesday to do some recon, and there were already a lot of people in line,” she said. “So I went to Costco, bought a pop-up tent, then went to Walmart for supplies and got in line.”
The first prospective buyers established the unofficial line outside Aloha Stadium on Tuesday afternoon. By the time security guards opened the main gate Friday at 7:45 p.m., several hundred were waiting to enter.
The number of people who turned out at the box office, roughly 200 more than the previous week, was an indication of how little faith local fans had in Ticketmaster’s online purchasing system and how much they believed that in-person purchases were a better alternative, despite warnings from stadium officials that this was not the case.
According to Aloha Stadium sales and marketing specialist Samantha Spain, the box office is not allotted a specific number of tickets, as many believe. Rather, the box office uses a designated Ticketmaster server that allows its staff to connect buyers with tickets at the same time that regular online purchasers are also attempting to buy tickets from their home computers, laptops, phones, tablets or other devices.
Last week, roughly 500 customers were able to purchase a maximum of four tickets each from the box office before tickets ran out. Approximately 75 people who also had waited in line were turned away, Spain said.
The gravity of Mars
Part of the problem is the remarkable drawing power of Mars himself.
At 32, the Hawaii-born pop star already has sold more than 100 million records and garnered 11 Grammy awards with 27 total nominations. Earlier this year he passed Justin Timberlake for most No. 1 pop singles by a solo male artist (nine) with his Cardi B collaboration “Finesse.”
His current 24k Magic Tour sold out its initial slate of dates — roughly a million tickets — in a single day. Now in its second year, the tour reaches Hawaii having already taken in more than $240 million. The man moves tickets.
Too bot to handle
And yet, as thousands of local fans can testily attest, there was something decidedly not human about the online sales blitzkrieg that erupted June 9.
Tech experts and industry observers have pointed to the likelihood that mainland-based ticket bots were used to shock and awe the Ticketmaster system as soon as tickets went on sale.
Bots are computer software capable of opening multiple browser tabs, accessing ticket sale sites and auto-filling forms at a much faster rate than a human user possibly could, essentially crowding out human competitors for the best seats available. That’s how fans who attempted to use multiple devices — six, eight, a dozen — to try to purchase tickets still had little chance of beating a bot, much less an army of them.
It is believed that bots were deployed by sellers in the secondary market looking to turn around the tickets at an astronomical markup.
The federal Better Online Ticket Sales (BOTS) Act of 2016 made it illegal the use bots to circumvent event ticketing limits. More than a dozen states also have enacted laws banning the use of ticketing bots, including California, where violators face up to six months in jail and fines of up to $2,500.
Friday, the state Office of Consumer Protection announced it would prosecute anyone who attempts to cheat the system to purchase Bruno Mars tickets.
“Time and time again, consumers are being left out in the cold when trying to purchase tickets to concerts and sporting events in high demand,” said Executive Director Stephen Levins. “It’s against the law to use computer software to game the system. If we obtain evidence that bots or other illegal methods were used to obtain or divert Bruno Mars tickets, we will prosecute the offenders to the fullest extent of the law.”
There should be a law
Four years ago, in the aftermath of the first Bruno Mars ticket fiasco, state Sen. Donna Mercado Kim introduced a Senate resolution calling for ticket sellers to make tickets available at box offices only for the first 48 hours of availability. Despite national attention, the resolution failed to advance.
That same session, the House took up ticket sales, scalping and related issues with a bill that sought to functionally prohibit ticket scalping. That measure, too, failed to advance. Hawaii remains one of only a few states without some sort of prohibition on scalping (except for boxing events).
“Local people should be able to purchase tickets to local events,” Mercado Kim said. “They’re the ones who stand in line. These are our venues that are hosting the events. Local people are the ones who have to deal with the traffic and parking problems they create.”
Mercado Kim said the Legislature again could take up the issue if the current outcry translates to a sustained will to change the situation.
“The resolution in 2014 was our attempt to make sure that local people have the opportunity to get tickets to these events, but we didn’t even get a hearing,” she said. “It was sad. By the time the legislation was introduced, people had forgotten about it. It’s not until the next big concert that it comes up again.”
84