10,000 tickets for 'sold out' Jacko shows are snapped up on website
Michael Jackson fans are paying six times the face value for a ticket to the singer's sold-out London concerts.
More than 10,000 tickets for Jackson's forthcoming residency at the O2 arena have already been sold at an average of £300 each on one ticket exchange website alone, in what has become Britain's most lucrative secondary ticket sales rush.
The demand comes after tickets for all 50 shows - which start this July and continue into next year - sold out in less than three days.
Many fans complained of being unable to buy standard tickets priced at £50-£75 because of technical errors with the official Ticketmaster website. The latest figures were revealed by Seatwave, Europe's largest fan-to-fan ticket exchange, which said its sales were up 200 per cent in the first quarter of the year, thanks largely to trading for the shows.
Seatwave, which makes 25 per cent commission, lost a bid to be the official secondary ticket sales partner to AEG Live, the promoter of Jackson's shows. Viagogo, another online ticket exchange, paid about £1.5million to sell about 1,000 "premium" seats for each show for up to £700. But the company fell out with AEG Live after making thousands of tickets available to touts, breaching its agreement with the US entertainment giant.
