Tickets jumping from €150 to €500? What's happening with Lady Gaga's concerts in Barcelona?

BarcelonaLady Gaga sold out all the tickets for the three concerts she will perform in Barcelona in October this Thursday in less than four hours, the only details of her tour. The Mayhem Ball In Spain, the 54,000 tickets available for the Palau Sant Jordi in Barcelona were sold out from 12 noon to 4 p.m., according to promoter Live Nation. The album Mayhem, since its release, has been an automatic success with critics and the public, and debuted at number one on the Billboard 200.

The news, which could have been purely euphoric for fans —because it has been seven years since Gaga's last concert at the Palau Sant Jordi, since the tour Joanne World Tour—, has become a new controversy against Ticketmaster and its pricing policy. On the one hand, because it has opened presales exclusively to customers of one bank, Santander, when normally only customers who sign up with the concert promoter or the ticket seller, Live Nation and Ticketmaster, respectively, which are the company itself, have access.

On the other hand, because of the serious problem posed by dynamic pricing. Fans, who have formed virtual queues of up to 30,000 people to buy tickets for the concerts on October 28, 29, and 31, have found that when they were ready to buy tickets, prices could increase by 200%. Why? Dynamic pricing is a system that allows prices to be raised based on demand, with no limit other than the buyer's purchasing power. This means that tickets that were advertised at between €63 and €205, and €137 on the dance floor (VIP tickets not included), can end up costing between €400 and €500.

Ticketmaster argues that this method prevents ticket resale because everyone already pays what they are willing to pay on the official platform, but the fact is that ticket resale still exists on portals like Viagogo, which currently has tickets for sale at exorbitant prices: from 350 on the dance floor to more than 1,000 euros in the stands. The controversy is not new and has affected other artists, such as Oasis, when even The British government announced that it would investigate ticket prices. The problem is the system's lack of transparency, because buyers don't know how much the ticket price is going up, how much they might end up paying, or what the rest of the group is paying.

Lady Gaga's tour will kick off on July 16 in Las Vegas at the T-Mobile Arena. It will stop in Seattle, New York, Miami, Toronto, Chicago, London, Stockholm, Milan, Barcelona, and Berlin. In the first week, Mayhem has accumulated over 240 million global streams, the artist's best streaming debut. This has made the sale of his concert tickets a global stress phenomenon.