Looking for tickets to Eric Andre’s sold-out Cornell show? While some can still be found online, purchasers should be prepared to pay upwards of $75 for illegally marked-up and resold tickets.
With Eric Andre — creator and host of Adult Swim’s “The Eric Andre Show” — slated to perform to a fully booked audience in Bailey Hall on March 23, many students have faced jacked-up ticket prices from resales while a lucky few are reaping profits.
Originally priced at $12 and $15 for balcony and floor seats respectively, tickets to see Eric Andre perform have now skyrocketed to prices averaging between $50 and $75, according to the Facebook discussion page for the event, now booming with more than 50 potential buyers and sellers.
Tameem Jahan ’19 received offers of up to $165 for three tickets after posting to solicit buyers on the event discussion page.
Other posts, like that of Arathi Bezwada ’20, asked potential buyers to “comment offers,” all of which exceeded $50 per ticket.
Ithaca College student Ethan Hughes, who failed to purchase a ticket during normal sales, said that he wished “Cornell would save a certain amount of tickets for [the] general public at a raised price.”
The Cornell University Programing Board tries to do just that, according to president of CUPB Daniela Manzano ’19, but with Eric Andre it was not possible because of the high demand from Cornell students, who had access to tickets a day early.
Ticket sales opened at 10:30 a.m. on March 1 and sold out by 5:30 p.m. — before the general public even had a chance to access tickets and after the website crashed in the afternoon. According to Manzano, if the ticket purchasing site had not crashed, preventing most purchases, tickets would have sold out in a few hours.
Denice Cassaro, a program coordinator in Campus Activities and CUPB’s advisor, told The Sun that the ticket site relies on both a third-party server and Cornell’s server to both facilitate ticket sales and verify student identification. The back-and-forth between these servers causes delays and a “bottlenecking,” as Cassaro explained, which can lead to the website server crashing.
Cornell students have the right of first-access to tickets because CUPB is funded by the student activity fee, which each student pays to help fund student organizations, according to Manzano.
One reason Eric Andre ticket sales faced long wait times, Cassaro explained, is that CUPB wanted purchasers to be able to select their own seats, rather than opt for suggested seats available to students as they check in at the venue.
Eric Andre’s team also “specifically wanted [the show] to be an event for students.” In the future if Andre did his own tour, he would want to present content to the greater Ithaca community, according to Manzano.
Regardless, Manzano noted pushback to ticket availability from both the Ithaca community and from Cornell students.
“We’ve noticed specifically that [for] this sold out show … that the response to it selling out has been very aggressive,” Manzano told The Sun. It’s a “very vocal crowd,” inspired by “Eric Andre’s out-of-the-box character.”
Students have further demanded that CUPB change the venue location from Bailey to the much-larger Barton Hall, in order to accommodate interested students who could not procure a ticket. Upgrading the venue was simply not a possibility for Eric Andre’s showing, according to Manzano.
“People don’t realize that there are a lot of logistics that go behind [Barton Hall],” Manzano told The Sun. “You have to reserve [Barton Hall] way ahead of time.”
When Cassaro was asked if she was aware of the ticket sales on Facebook, she acknowledged the activity and warned, “that is not legal for people to be selling tickets.”
After the interview with The Sun, Manzano changed the settings for the event’s discussion page so that all posts had to be approved by the page’s administrators.
“This is just the reality of any ticketed show that gets sold out,” Manzano told The Sun. “Bringing [Eric Andre] back to Cornell is definitely an option.”
Cassaro emphasized that purchasers should be careful when buying tickets online to make sure they don’t receive tickets that have been duplicated, as those tickets will become void at the door.
The show is still slated for 7 p.m. on March 23 in Bailey Hall.