MEXICO: Hundreds of people were locked out of the Bad Bunny’s sold-out gig last weekend due to a Ticketmaster fiasco. Addressing the incident, the Mexican President, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has requested that the Puerto Rican rapper performs for free at the city’s iconic Zócalo plaza.
During his regular morning news conference, López Obrador said Bad Bunny was a “supportive” and “sensitive” person, adding that, although the government could not pay Bad Bunny, it would fund limited production costs for the concert.
President Obrador said, “I ask Bad Bunny; I know he is overworked and tired because he works a lot, but I ask him to consider the possibility of coming to Mexico, to the Zócalo,” he continued, “Hopefully, he comes.”
Hundreds of individuals who had tickets for Bad Bunny’s show at the Azteca stadium on Friday were turned away when they tried to enter. This led to many tearful, irate fans posting on social media in Mexico over the weekend.
“It made us very emotional to see sad young people who couldn’t enter because their tickets were cloned because they were cheated, some crying,” President stated. “They saved for a long time to be able to buy their tickets.”
Ticketmaster will be required to reimburse the full price of tickets obtained through legal channels and a 20% compensation fee, according to a statement made on Saturday by Profeco, Mexico’s consumer protection organization.
Ricardo Sheffield, the CEO of Profeco, informed the local press that his office had received about 1,600 refund requests as of Saturday.
In an interview with a local station, Sheffield stated, “Ticketmaster said they were fake, but they emitted all of them.” He added that the company could be fined as much as 10% of its sales last year.
Ticketmaster Mexico refuted Sheffield’s assertions in a message on Twitter, pointing out that more than 4.5 million individuals had registered for just 120,000 tickets.
According to the firm, the refusal of access was brought on by “an unprecedented quantity of fake tickets, bought outside of our official channels,” misunderstanding among the staff, and problems with the ticket reading technology.
As a result of “extraordinarily high demands,” the US ticketing behemoth, Ticketmaster, was forced to cancel public sales for singer Taylor Swift’s Eras tour, which drew outrage from lawmakers and a lawsuit from fans. The failure in Mexico follows that country’s own Ticketmaster disaster.
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