Tickets to the Tragically Hip’s summer tour will go on sale later this morning.
Fans will be desperate to secure tickets for what could be the band’s final tour, following Gord Downie’s diagnosis of brain cancer.
Once tickets go on sale, fans will face stiff competition from scalpers who use computer software to buy hundreds of tickets at once in order to sell them at a huge markup.
Ticket pre-sales started earlier this week and left many Vancouver fans frustrated.
Following Tuesday’s Vancouver pre-sale, many rushed to social media to complain about prices on secondary retail sites that climbed into the thousands of dollars.
“With this particular tour, the emotion and the sentimentality that is attached to it has underscored this problem more than ever,” radio host Alan Cross said.
READ MORE: Why it’s so hard to get Tragically Hip tickets
Ticket promoter Kingsley Bailey says the Tragically Hip pre-sale highlights a lack of transparency in the industry.
“It’s not the ticket brokers. It’s not the ticket bots. It’s the initial sale of the tickets,” Bailey said. “We need transparency to see how many tickets are really going to the general public. Then we can really be able to make a conscious decision and say, hey, am I happy with the system or do we need legislation to fix it?”
-With files from Jon Azpiri