Jay Chou Photo: Courtesy of Tencent Music

 

While Chinese netizens complained how challenging for them to snap up tickets for 'King of Mandopop' Jay Chou's September concert in Tianjin, the ticket scalpers have touted the price for two adjacent seats at 150,000 yuan ($20,800) through an online flea market. 

Jay Chou, a singer and songwriter born in the Taiwan region in 1979 and whose ballads are often heard echoing in the hallways of China's karaoke bars during the first decade or so of the millennium, will have four concerts in North China's Tianjin from September 7 to September 10.

On China's leading online ticketing platform for live events Damai where more than 5.2 million people expressed a desire to attend the concert, while nearly130,000 tickets were snapped up within 30 seconds when they were on sale on Tuesday. The concert tickets on another online entertainment ticketing company Maoyan will start on sale on Friday.

Some scalpers have touted one ticket for a seat in the three front rows of the inner field at an asking price of 19,800 yuan and a pair of tickets originally priced at 2,000 yuan had been scalped at 150,000 yuan. The hashtag "a pair of tickets scalped at 150,000 yuan" has become a trending topic on China's Twitter-like social media platform Weibo with 340 million views and comments.

Some netizens called for a thorough real-name ticketing system established in snapping concert tickets to deal with scalpers, just like the system deployed in buying train tickets. Others complained their longtime suffering of being unable to grab concert tickets and paying for exorbitantly priced scalped tickets, from Malaysian singer and songwriter Fish Leong, Taiwan-based singer Rene Liu Ruo-Ying and band Mayday, to Jay Chou and Singaporean singer Wayne Lim Junjie.

In May, nearly 300,000 tickets for six concerts of Mayday sold out within five seconds after going on sale. Fans therefore questioned the collusion between the organizer and scalpers, which was then denied by the concert organizer, saying the ticket sale is open and transparent.

According to China Association of Performing Arts, box office revenue from performances reached nearly 16.8 billion yuan in the first half of 2023, an increase of 673.49 percent compared to the same period last year. The number of shows including large-scale concerts and music festivals has reached 506, generating box office revenue of about 2.5 billion yuan with about 5.5 million attendees.