Going to Great Lengths To Make Beyoncé’s Tour
How far would you go to see the artist who has won the most Grammy Awards? Is it more than 9,300 kilometers?
For Janny Nascimento, a 29-year-old English teacher in Brazil, missing Beyoncé’s Renaissance World Tour — the singer’s first solo tour since 2016 — was not an option. So she paid 850 euros, or about $900, for a pair of tickets to see her favorite artist on June 24 in Frankfurt, Germany.
“This is the dream come true,” Ms. Nascimento said from her apartment in Campos dos Goytacazes, four hours northeast of Rio de Janeiro. Though she has never before traveled outside Brazil, “now I’m going through two continents to a place that I have never been to, a country where I don’t even speak the language,” she said.
The announcement of the tour on Instagram last month touched off a frenzy for tickets. But early in the registration process, Ticketmaster issued a warning that “demand already exceeds the number of tickets available by more than 800 percent” in several cities, prompting some fans to consider another option: Crossing an ocean for a concert.
Bre Harper, 27, a creative partnerships manager at Spotify who lives in Los Angeles, realized her chances of getting tickets to a North American stop on the tour were slim.
“I, with the rest of the internet, went on Ticketmaster, where you have to be verified as a fan,” she said, referring to restrictions on sales for U.S. tour dates. “I didn’t feel like fiddling with the whole Verified Fan thing.”
She learned that she did not have to be verified to buy tickets to the European leg of the tour. She also noticed that those tickets were often hundreds of dollars cheaper than comparable U.S. tickets.
The only city she could find with tickets available in the “Club Renaissance” standing section was Warsaw, Poland. Ms. Harper bought a pair of $475 tickets. “She now has a life, a family,” she said of Beyoncé. “I think this is going to be her last hurrah, and I didn’t want to miss it.”
Tickets to the tour, which is in support of Beyoncé’s seventh solo studio album, “Renaissance,” went on sale to members of the BeyHive fan club on February 6. Ticketmaster’s decision to require Verified Fan registration is an attempt to thwart bots and stop scalpers from buying tickets and reselling them.
Last year, Ticketmaster was forced to cancel a general release of tickets to Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour. Fans complained that tickets were being resold at absurd markups. The U.S. Justice Department opened an investigation into Live Nation Entertainment, which owns Ticketmaster.
Beyoncé’s tour is scheduled to begin on May 10, cutting across Europe before heading to North America in July.
Ms. Harper, who grew up in a military family, said she had traveled through Europe extensively, but never to Poland.
“It’s not that frightening to me,” she said. “You only live once — let’s go!”