Public Interest
Some websites offered early tickets, which the Association of Secondary Ticket Agents warned were fake. "We are warning people not to buy tickets that are not yet on sale because it is unlikely that they will receive those tickets", announced the organization's chief, Graham Burns. He concluded, "It's impossible when the dates haven't been announced to be selling tickets for something when there are no announced dates". Jackson's official website allowed fans to register early for a "pre-sale" draw. Some fans had difficulty applying, as the website could not deal with the large number of registrations—reportedly up to 16,000 applications a second. In the space of 24 hours, nearly a million people from around the world registered for pre-sale tickets, enough to fill the venue 50 times over. Tickets that had not even been printed were selling on auction website eBay for £300. Sales of Jackson's albums increased following the press conference. Overnight, sales of Off the Wall rose 200%, Bad rose 110%, Dangerous rose 165% and Thriller 25 rose 155%.
The two day pre-sale began on March 11, and 40 extra dates were added to meet high demand—five of these dates were reserved in their entirety for the public sale. More than 1.5 million fans caused two sites offering pre-sale tickets to crash within minutes of going online. In the space of two hours, 190,000 tickets were sold. Two million people tried to buy pre-sale tickets in the space of 18 hours. Veronica Schmidt of The Times stated of the reception, "Michael Jackson has floored his critics", while organizers proclaimed it a "cultural phenomenon". It was announced that Jackson would break the record for number of shows performed by an artist at a single venue, which had been set by Prince, who hosted a residency at the same arena for his 21 Nights in London concerts. According to Jackson's website, the following records were or would have been broken: "The biggest audience ever to see an artist in one city", "The most amount of people to attend a series of arena shows", "The fastest ticket sales in history". Randy Phillips acknowledged that Jackson could have sold out even more dates, but this would have conflicted with other career plans that the singer had. On March 13, the other 50% of seats for dates 1–45 and all the seats for dates 46–50 went on sale to the general public. Within a few hours, all 50 dates had sold out. At this stage, the sales of King of Pop were up 400% and the sales of Thriller were up 200%. Tickets appeared on eBay for as much as £10,000.
Read more about this topic: This Is It (concerts)
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