Little Monsters prepare to battle for tickets to Lady Gaga’s Singapore-exclusive concerts in May
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The online pre-sales on Ticketmaster begin on March 18 and end with the general sale on March 21 for the four announced dates.
PHOTO: REUTERS
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SINGAPORE – Lady Gaga fans in Singapore and around Asia are preparing themselves for a bloodbath during ticket sales for the American pop star’s upcoming Singapore concerts. The shows
The online pre-sales on Ticketmaster begin on March 18 and end with the general sale on March 21 for the four announced dates – May 18, 19, 21 and 24 – at the National Stadium. Ticket prices have not been announced.
Mr Dion Ong, 29, a digital content and marketing executive, says: “I’m activating everyone I know. My family, my colleagues, my friends.”
He is particularly keen to watch her live for the first time, as he missed the 38-year-old singer’s Born This Way Ball tour concerts held at the Singapore Indoor Stadium in 2012, when he was just 16.
“None of my friends wanted to go and I didn’t dare to go alone. I even made the effort to go down and buy merchandise. I stood outside the venue for the first three songs before leaving,” he recalls.
The Born This Way album, released in 2011, was his formative moment as a “Little Monster” – as Lady Gaga refers to her fans – says Mr Ong. “As a queer individual, I found normality in that album.”
With Singapore being her only regional stop for this tour, acquiring tickets will be a challenging task. Some fans expect it to be similar to the purchasing frenzy for American pop star Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour concerts in Singapore.
Swift’s gigs took place over six nights in March 2024, also at the National Stadium.
The pre-sale and general sale tickets for The Eras Tour sold out in a matter of hours over two days in July 2023. It might have been even faster if not for technical issues, some of which were caused by the high traffic demand on Ticketmaster’s servers. More than three million queue numbers were issued during the pre-sale alone.
Regional fans who missed out on Singapore tickets had the opportunity to later try for tickets to Swift’s four February 2024 concerts in Tokyo, Japan. But Little Monsters will not have this reassurance, as Lady Gaga appears to be skipping Japan this time around.
Nevertheless, Mr Ong is quick to add: “As part of Little Monster culture, everyone is welcome.”
Accordingly, he has started the SG Little Monsters group on Telegram ( t.me/sglittlemonsters
He took inspiration from the SG Swifties Telegram group, set up two months before The Eras Tour’s Singapore leg was announced in June 2023. Dedicated to Swift, SG Swifties now has more than 4,500 members.
There are more than 100 members in the SG Little Monsters group. At the moment, much of the chatter is speculation over possible ticket prices.
While comparisons with Swift’s Eras Tour at the National Stadium are inevitable, Kiss92 radio deejay Joshua Simon, 34, says Lady Gaga’s importance to the global LGBTQ community is special and cannot be understated.
“For us, it’s more than a bunch of pop songs, more than just a party. For our millennial generation, she is the mother of queer art. She hires us, celebrates us, stands up for us on a global scale – and she has been doing so since before it was acceptable or cool. And in certain parts of the world, it still isn’t either of those things,” he notes.
He attended the Born This Way Ball tour concert in Singapore and will be coming out of “concert retirement” for the Mayhem tour, as he has drastically scaled back his concert attendance in his 30s.
“It takes a lot to get me out of the house after 5pm these days, but I have to for Gaga,” he jokes.
Elsewhere online, fans across the region expressed their mingled excitement, trepidation and confusion at the prospect of competing with Asia’s Little Monsters to snag a ticket to watch “Mother Monster” in Singapore.
“It’s ridiculous that Japan wasn’t included” as a stop, said one fan on the r/LadyGaga community on Reddit, which has more than 680,000 members.
Another user pointed out: “Not everyone has the capacity to travel abroad and spend thousands to see her, even if it’s just around the region.”
“I know she’s definitely skipping the Philippines because of the protests (the last time she was there),” added yet another fan.
Lady Gaga’s 2012 concert in Manila was plagued by mass protests from Christian groups. Her Jakarta stop that same year was cancelled when Indonesian police refused to issue her permits, following objections from Islamic groups.
