For those in Japan, have you ever wondered what it is like to purchase concert tickets outside of Japan? In my previous post, I briefly described the difficulties foreigners face buying Japan concert tickets, and yet, how I still prefer the Japanese system. In this post I will give some insight as to why the overseas experience (outside Japan) is a lot less equitable.

YOASOBI will be having a concert in Singapore on 22nd / 23rd February 2025 and I was really keen to buy a ticket for my son and I. I promised my son to try to bring him to see YOASOBI so I wanted to keep that promise. Last year in end 2023, I failed to get the tickets for the two of us for the YOASOBI concert held at a much smaller venue in early 2024, so this time was the revenge match.

When it announced that Ticketmaster would be the official ticket seller, most fans already knew that it was going to be another uphill battle against bots and scalpers. Looking back at Dec 2023, the tickets were sold out almost instantaneously, and immediately afterwards, the tickets were being re-sold on other platforms at elevated prices. This infuriated fans who couldn’t buy the tickets, myself included.

The main difference in the system between Japan and overseas is that the overseas system operate almost solely on first-come-first-served concept. Of course I understand that such methods are also common for general sales stage in Japan, but it is usually after at least a round of balloting for fan club members. In Japan, this would help allow more of the existing fans to have a chance. Moreover, since usually the tickets for popular concerts tend to be Smart Tickets (i.e. linked to your phone number/app account) and need to show the app on your phone to enter the venue, it is less likely for scalpers to easily resell the tickets. In Singapore, the tickets from this single round of sales could be paper ticket or printed, and hence, if there are no strict checks upon entry, it would be easy for scalpers to convince desperate fans to take the risk. This also results in a lot of scams and fraud, but companies such as Ticketmaster already pocketed the sales money and hence would it is not their problem anymore.

This simple difference makes the experience a lot more hectic overseas, since basically it becomes the battle of who could develop the best/fastest bots to buy all the tickets first and then resell to others at high price.

To see how fast the tickets sold out, below are some screenshots of me trying to login (still at my workplace) before the general sales period and the queue number was already #53,406. Considering that the venue probably could only hold around 9,000-10,000 people each day, just by numbers, it didn’t look promising.

It took about 8 minutes after the start before the system finally released me to select which ticket zone I would like to purchase. Immediately I was greeted with “no tickets available” and “currently not available” messages. It is like I lost before I even started!

However, I continued to refresh the page in the hope that some people would back out at the last minute, and true enough, some tickets did seem to re-appear. However, every time you clicked on it and tried to confirm payment, it often kicked you out again since it was already bought by others (I was so angry that I didn’t even remember to take a screen shot of that).

There were some people who did manage to buy tickets from this, but it was mainly for single separated seats and often based on buying whatever was available rather than whatever zone they initially wanted.

In my heart, I laughed at the irony that I was writing a blog about how to buy tickets in Japan, and yet I could not even get a ticket in my home country in Singapore.

The silver lining to all this, is that I was lucky that a friend’s friend had 2 extra tickets and could accommodate my son and I, so that I could finally keep my promise to my son. I look forward to attending the YOASOBI concert in Feb 2025!

Overall, the chances of fans getting a ticket increased compared to the previous year as I saw far fewer complaints about being unable to get tickets. This is partially due to the venue being close to double the size and over two days, so easily an increase in capacity of about 4 times. To be fair to SOZO / Ticketmaster, this year’s process had some improvement over the previous year by having added an extra ballot for early access code, that allowed those who won the ballot to enter an early first-come-first-served stage. This helped to allow part of the fans to be able to have a chance to buy earlier. However, this still had problems since:

1. It didn’t require logging in with payment pledge first to join the ballot, so basically it was still open to everyone (including scalpers who just created multiple email accounts) and end up many fans still did not get the early access code. To improve, next time just make it require credit card verification so that it is harder for scalpers to make multiple accounts.
   
2. The early access code was not locked to a particular Ticketmaster account, and hence it was abused by scalpers by selling access code instead. This was even worse since local online marketplace platforms like Carousell deliberately turned a blind eye and didn’t even allow you to report these as they claim that “there wasn’t enough information to confirm that it violates community guidelines or listing rules”, probably because they are not selling tickets directly. To improve, next time just make the early access ballot to be locked to Ticketmaster account or directly make it ballot for tickets instead of ballot for access.
   
3. Even after you win the early access code, it was still first-come-first-served, so still subject to bots being potentially faster. Adding captchas might help, but probably best would still be to just make it ballot ticket system and locked to phone app as smart ticket.

What are your thoughts on the ticket purchasing system? Do you prefer this or the Japan system? Do feel free to share in the comments.

It is going to be the first Japanese artistes concert I attend in Singapore. I wrote a post previously about how it is outside the venue for a concert in Japan based on my experience for LiSA concerts. Can someone share with me what will be different in Singapore so that I know what to expect?