Adele Draws Criticism for Privacy Breaches in Ticket Sales for New Tour in 2016

Adele has drawn some criticism for privacy breaches that occurred during ticket sales leading up to her first new tour in five years. The pre-sale was organized by Songkick, an artist discovery platform that recently merged with the direct-to-fan ticketing company Crowdsurge over the summer. Her pre-sale for tickets sold out in a little over four hours on her artist website.

This tour is set to be a big seller, and as reported by an article in Music Business Worldwide, a record 500,000 fans signed up on the singer's artist website for a chance at pre-sale tickets. Only 57,000 were subsequently sold for the 12 original shows that were posted. An insider source asserted that both Songkick and Adele's management team were able to orchestrate a 50 percent reduction of ticket resales using strategic online tactics and voiding any tickets found to be resold.

It was further asserted that there were additionally some major breaches of privacy during the pre-sale. Some of the fans involved claimed that their personal information was available to other buyers. Another source even claimed to Billboard that "Management took a huge gamble with an unproven system on the biggest artist in the world, and it absolutely collapsed in their face."

According to Billboard, Songkick responded that "at no time was anyone able to access another person's password, nor their payment or credit card details (which are not retained by Songkick)." However, a more complete recounting of the statement by TechInsider did confirm that some fans "were unfortunately able to preview other users' shopping carts for brief periods due to extreme load."

Fans were thrilled when Adele announced her European dates in a comical announcement video, where she pointed to where each show would be on a map. The 36 European dates include stops in Belfast and Dublin in Ireland, London, Manchester, London, Glasgow and Birmingham in the United Kingdom.