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Music

10th May 2018

Nine Inch Nails may have defeated the touts with how they’re selling tickets to their just-announced world tour

Rory Cashin

They’ve also released details of a brand new album.

When it comes to gigs, one of the biggest problems that fans are facing these days is the likelihood that some scalper bot will beat you to the tickets on the website, and the gig is suddenly sold out within seconds, and then “second hand” tickets are available on re-seller sites for who-knows-how-much-more money than they were being sold for in the first place.

Nine Inch Nails are looking for a way around the problem, with a solution that they think will “still suck”, but just suck in a slightly different way.

The tour has been announced in tandem with their new album Bad Witch, which is due out on Friday 22 June, and for the moment their Cold And Black Infinite Tour doesn’t have any Irish dates, but they do have two London dates, including the Robert Smith-curated Meltdown festival on the same day their new album is released.

However, the big news of the tour is that Trent Reznor and company have decided not to do ANY digital sales, and only provide physical tickets, with a maximum of four being sold per person at a physical box office.

This, they’re hoping, will find a way around ticket touting, but it does also include potentially waiting hours (or days?) while exposed to the elements.

While there is nothing stopping from someone buying those tickets and then reselling them at a higher price, it would take a truly determined tout to queue for such a long time and look for a worthwhile profit from just four tickets at a time.

Reactions from fans has been mixed, but we’ll see how it really turns out once the sales themselves have actually taken place.