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Entertainment

Oprah's Denver Stop Officially Sold Out

TicketWeb Inundated; Sales Switched To Ticketmaster

UPDATED: 1:52 pm MDT April 5, 2005

Thousands of Oprah Winfrey fans in Colorado say they're disappointed after a frustrating attempt to buy tickets to her "Live Your Best Life Tour" coming to Denver at the end of the month.

But there was good news briefly Tuesday morning.

On Tuesday at 11:30 a.m., after all the headaches and hassles, the organizers of the event released more tickets. Approximately 1,500 tickets to the live Oprah Winfrey event at the Colorado Convention Center were available at noon but by 12:45 p.m., the event was officially sold out.

The event promoters -- people at O Magazine -- also issued this statement:

Ticketmaster took last night to verify that tickets were not being sold to scalpers attempting to buy large quantities of tickets to sell for profit. These tickets were held back to ensure that they could be purchased by the general public at a fair market price. Our sincere apologies go out to anyone who was inconvenienced by this matter.

Elizabeth Dye
Associate Manager of Public Relations Director
O, The Oprah Magazine

When tickets went on sale at 10 a.m. Monday, Oprah fans and online scalpers flooded the Web site originally selling the tickets -- TicketWeb.com. The site and its 800-phone number were so overloaded with so many requests and because of an "extremely high level of unauthorized purchasing activity from ticket scalpers and brokers," TicketWeb was unable to process most sales, said a spokeswoman for O Magazine.

Oprah is taking her "Live Your Best Life" tour to Denver on April 30 but tickets to the event are already sold out.

A few people told 7NEWS that they were able to buy tickets, however. They were the fortunate ones.

Later in the day, event promoters moved ticket sales from TicketWeb to Ticketmaster, its parent company. Tickets officially went on sale on Ticketmaster at 9 p.m. but within 10 minutes, the 5,000 tickets that were available appeared to have been snatched up.

Representatives with O Magazine apologized for the problems. They said Oprah has no plans to add another live show in Denver.

Tickets were on sale for $185 but a search through eBay Tuesday morning showed that some tickets are now being sold for as much as $700.

During events or concerts that generate a lot of interest, scalpers use online "robots" or "bots" to buy up a large numbers of tickets, which they sell later at a much higher cost. This is apparently what happened on TicketWeb.

Tickets have also sold out quickly in the 16 other cities where Oprah has taken her tour, but an O Magazine spokeswoman said TicketWeb never had serious problems before now.


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