Garth Brooks is one of the best-selling music artists in American history, a country superstar who has sold more records than almost anyone alive. When he books a city, the tickets go fast. This fall he set two shows at the T-Mobile Center in Kansas City, one on Friday Nov 6 and one on Saturday Nov 7. With fees, a seat ran $155.
They were not enough. So many fans got shut out that Garth did something he loves to do. He added a third show, a Saturday matinee, just to make room for the people who missed out.
That is when the numbers got strange.
On Friday Oct 23, more than 90,000 people were waiting in the online line for the new matinee. For one afternoon show in one arena, 90,000 in the digital queue. It looked like the biggest demand of the whole tour.
Here is a local news report from Kansas City breaking down what happened next.
Kansas City TV news report on the Garth Brooks matinee
The truth was that most of those 90,000 were not fans at all. They were bots. A bot is a computer program that jumps into ticket lines by the thousands, grabs seats in a blink, then resells them to real people at a markup. The line that looked like a sea of Garth fans was mostly software.
Garth did not try to sell through it. He pulled the plug on the whole matinee. His team put it plainly. “There will be no Saturday matinee performance in Kansas City.” Every person who had already bought a matinee ticket gets an automatic refund, no forms and no phone calls. The two evening shows on Nov 6 and 7 are untouched and still on.
In a statement on his website he summed up the week. “It was a day of highs and lows, all for the same reason. It’s all about taking care of those people who love the music.” People magazine printed his two-word apology to fans. “My Deepest Apologies.”
The same day the Kansas City line turned out to be fake, something real was happening across the country. Seattle broke Garth’s own records for the fastest sellouts and the biggest queue he had ever drawn. He answered that the honest way too, by adding a fourth Seattle show for the fans who kept lining up.
Here is the earlier report on Garth bringing the tour to Kansas City in the first place.
Earlier news report on the tour coming to Kansas City
There is a sweet footnote to all of this. Garth’s mother was born in Kansas City, so the stop was always a little personal for him.
On Oct 28 he added one more treat for a crowd he does not get to see often. He announced his first Canadian dates of the tour, two nights at the TD Coliseum in Hamilton, Ontario, on Dec 4 and 5, with tickets going on sale Friday Nov 6 at 10 AM Eastern. He had a kind word for the fans up north. “Nobody gives them credit for knowing their country music the way they do.”