The general sale for Ariana Grande’s Eternal Sunshine tour went live Sep 10 at 10 a.m. and, within minutes, the tickets were completely sold out. This doesn’t come as much of a shock from anyone who has had the unfortunate experience of trying to buy concert tickets over the past five years, but it generated anger from anticipating fans.
When Grande announced her first tour post-pandemic on her Instagram, she immediately became a trending topic on social media. Since her last tour in 2019, fans didn’t think they’d see Grande grace the stage again after securing her dream role in the blockbuster musical hit, Wicked. The tour spans across major cities in the U.S. with stops in Canada and England, totaling in 10 cities.
Shortly after tour dates were listed, it was announced that Grande had chosen to opt out of dynamic pricing. According to Rolling Stone, dynamic pricing is when prices fluctuate depending on number of available seats and levels of interest. Fans were excited, hoping the process of receiving a ticket would be a lot smoother than other experiences.
As with any show that sells out soon after lines open, tickets began to appear for resell by scalpers. To sum up the practice of scalpers, they buy tickets of any entertainment entity in bulk at market price. Once the demand is high, they resell them at an even higher price. Scalping isn’t anything new and is a common phenomenon within any form of commercialized art. However, that doesn’t take away how infuriating the process is for fans.
The outrage from fans stirred feelings of deja vu, as Ticketmaster has a history of upsetting concert goers. They recently had a case filed by over two dozen fans of Taylor Swift for price fixing her Eras Tour, according to a timeline by People Magazine.
While there isn’t an official number announcing how many fans signed up for Eternal Sunshine’s sale line, many uploaded screenshots with the number of people waiting ahead touching 100,000.
The excitement for Grande’s 2026 tour doesn’t only stem from the pause in her popstar-focused career. Fans were anticipating the performance of her 2020 album, Positions. Outside of a few live shows with Vevo in 2021, she has never performed Positions on stage.
Grande’s fanbase is extremely large in following and influence, so it wouldn’t come as a surprise if the situation would influence Ticketmaster to tighten their ticket holding process. But many of us aren’t holding our breaths for the potential outcome.
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