Electric Avenue tickets are already being advertised for as much as quadruple their original value online after tens of thousands of fans scrambled to secure passes to the sold-out Christchurch festival.
The final 15,000 tickets to Australasia’s largest festival, playing Hagley Park on February 26 and 27, were released today.
Organisers said the general sale and One NZ after sale allocations had been exhausted almost immediately.
Soon after tickets sold out, tickets began appearing on sites such as Facebook Marketplace and Trade Me at significantly inflated prices.
1News spotted several online users claiming to have tickets for sale, including weekend general admission passes advertised for as much as $2000, four times their original price of around $500.
Most of the tickets advertised online were accompanied by a photo of the festival lineup rather than a screenshot of the ticket as proof of purchase. Some users also claimed to have secured more than the maximum four tickets allowed per customer.
Several Facebook users who missed out on tickets expressed frustration at the number of scalpers advertising tickets online.
“When people buy them [tickets] up just to mark them up even further, it means genuine fans who simply want to attend the concert are missing out,” one user wrote.
“Festivals need to do better and avoid in the future of this happening!” another added.
Warning for would-be festivalgoers
Consumer NZ communications and campaigns manager Jessica Walker warned those who missed out to be cautious when turning to resale sites.
“Unfortunately, there’s no law in NZ to prevent tickets being resold for a higher price,” she told 1News.
“Our advice to prevent being ripped off is to only buy tickets from the authorised seller – head to the official event website to find out who that is.”
People considering a resale ticket should also check the original seller’s terms and conditions, Walker said, as some tickets may not be honoured if they have been resold.
There were further risks if an event was cancelled, with any refund from the ticketing company generally going to the original purchaser rather than the person who later bought the ticket.
Walker also advised people to avoid clicking on the top link of an internet search when searching for tickets to an event.
“Ticket resellers pay for prime position,” she added.
‘Record-breaking’ demand for tickets
Electric Avenue organisers said the demand for tickets was “immediate”, with 58,674 individual fans joining at least one ticket queue during today’s release.
More than half of those fans joined the queue more than once, resulting in 96,395 total queue joins across the available ticket types.
The final ticket allocation included 5000 tickets secured by One NZ customers. A further 32,000 tickets were also sold in April, before the festival’s lineup had dropped.
Electric Avenue managing director Callam Mitchell described the response to the latest release as “extraordinary”.
“Selling 32,000 weekend passes before announcing a single artist was an incredible vote of confidence,” he said.
“Electric Avenue has become a destination festival in its own right, with people travelling from all over the country, and increasingly from overseas, to be part of the experience.
“The response today has been extraordinary, and we feel a real responsibility to repay the faith people have placed in us. Now our focus is on delivering an epic experience for everyone joining us in February.”
Announced earlier this month, the festival’s lineup was led by global heavyweight DJ Calvin Harris — playing his only New Zealand show at the festival — and rock band Kings Of Leon, making their first return to New Zealand in almost 20 years.
Other notable names included in the lineup were Major Lazer, Bebe Rexha, Jungle, Fat Freddy’s Drop, Underworld, Kehlani, Wilkinson and Tove Lo.
Legendary Kiwi band Split Enz reunited to headline the 2026 edition of the festival, alongside Australian DJ Dom Dolla.
The two-day festival will return to Christchurch’s Hagley Park on February 26 and 27, 2027.