Mexico President Asks Bad Bunny to Play Free Concert – Billboard

Bad Bunny could fix a bad situation in Mexico by playing a free concert.

That’s the suggestion of the country’s president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a do-over after hundreds were shut out of his concert in Mexico City in a ticketing snafu which is now being investigated.

When Bad Bunny’s World’s Hottest Tour stopped in the capital over the weekend, a flood of bogus tickets ruined the experience for many fans.

As previously reported, a total of 1,600 faulty tickets were reported for the first concert Dec. 9, and 110 for the second on Dec. 10. Both shows were at Estadio Azteca, with 80,000 people attending each night.

Due to the “oversale” of tickets, Ricardo Sheffield, head of Mexico’s Federal Attorney’s Office for Consumers (PROFECO), said that those affected must receive a 100% refund plus a 20% compensation, and that Ticketmaster Mexico must be fined.

López Obrador has played the ball back into Bad Bunny’s court. Though the government couldn’t offer the Puerto Rican singer a fee, he said taxpayers would cover the cost for lights, stage and sound system, and even install a zip line.

“I would tell him how deeply we were touched to see young people sad because they couldn’t get in, because they had duplicated tickets, because they were victims of fraud,” the Associated Press quotes López Obrador.

Bad Bunny’s representatives did not immediately respond to the AP on the president’s offer.

Mexico’s consumer protection agency has said it will investigate the ticketing fiasco, which saw Bad Bunny’s show on Friday delayed for almost an hour.

According to the AP, Ticketmaster Mexico has said the event was highly sought-after but denied the concerts were oversold. A company statement said 4.5 million requests, with counterfeit tickets blocking some legitimate ticketholders from entry. 

Despite the situation in Mexico City, Bad Bunny can look back on another dominant year, one that made him the biggest artist on the planet.

On the live front, Bad Bunny was the year’s highest-grossing touring artist, with over $373.5 million in ticket sales, according to Boxscore (with 20 Latin American stadium shows still left to play and tally).

On the recording side, his May album release Un Verano Sin Ti, via independent label Rimas Entertainment and distributed through The Orchard, is the first non-English album to ever top the year-end Billboard 200, after logging 13 weeks at the summit.

In November, it also became the first all-Spanish release nominated for album of the year at the Grammy Awards, and led Spotify’s annual albums chart.

The singer and rapper came in at No. 1 on Spotify’s most-streamed global artists list, with more than 18.5 billion streams in 2022, and becomes the first artist to top the tally for three consecutive years.