HONOLULU, Feb. 17 (UPI) -- Hawaii Senate President Donna Mercado Kim introduced a Senate Resolution Wednesday that could change the way concert tickets are sold.
The "Bruno Mars Act" limits all ticket purchases to the physical box office for the first 48-hours of them having gone on sale. The resolution follows an incident that took place Monday Feb 11. in which tickets for Bruno Mars' Moonshine Jungle tour stop in Honolulu were sold out in a matter of two hours, with only 6 percent of the tickets being purchased at the box office.
Local residents who wanted to attend the show at the 8,800-person Blaisdell Arena will now be forced to pay up to four times as much for tickets being resold by scalpers online.
According to Forbes, 42 percent of the sales for the show came from people from the mainland and Canada, which likely means that those who purchased the tickets don't plan to go to the concert themselves, but to resell their seats for profit.
While the official regular ticket price for Mars' show in Honolulu is under $100, the price in the parallel market is around $446, making the tickets the 6th most expensive in his tour. 42 percent of the tickets are the equivalent to 3,696 tickets, which means re-sellers will earn an estimated $1.2 million in profit.
If the "Bruno Mars Act" does pass, it would ensure that most people who purchase concert tickets actually plan on attending the event themselves, Forbes points out. In a city like Honolulu, which is disconnected from the rest of the country and where there are 350,000 residents, it is unlikely that a scalper would come all the way to the box office to purchase a ticket for resale.
Mars' Moonshine Jungle tour began Feb. 15 in Las Vegas.
[Forbes]
