Following her epic return to the spotlight, Jazmine Sullivan announced the highly anticipated Heaux Tales tour coming to a city near you in February and March 2022. When tickets became available for pre-sale last Wednesday (Dec. 1), they were surprisingly inexpensive, and nearly every city sold out. Some cities had tickets for as low as $40–$60.
However, when the public sale began last Friday (Dec. 3), the remaining tickets flew off virtual shelves and skyrocketed in price with some tickets now costing more than $300 for general admission. The reseller-bot industry had fans in an uproar and Sullivan took to Instagram to address the issue.
The 34-year-old wrote, “I want to address what’s happening with my tour tickets. The reality is these are regular people who purchased tickets and are reselling them for a profit. It’s not right, but that’s what’s happening. We don’t have control over it because we don’t know these people, but it’s part of the reason why we moved into larger venues in 7 cities—to release more tickets for my fans to purchase.”
The 2021 Soul Train Award winner continued, “I just felt like I needed to say something because I hate to see my true fans upset and unable to purchase tickets that they’ve been waiting for. I’m so sorry if you weren’t able to get tickets this time around, but I will be doing more shows for you, I promise.”
On Cyber Monday (Nov. 29), NY legislation—Representative Paul Tonko (D-NY), Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-NY), and Senator Ben Ray Luján (D-NM)—announced the introduction of the Stopping Grinch Bots Act.
The bill is set to “rack down on cyber Grinches using ‘bot’ technology.” In 2016, they introduced the Better Online Ticket Sales Act (BOTS Act), which was signed into law to ban “ticket bots” that intentionally bypass security measures on online ticketing websites to unfairly outprice individual fans.