Big Blue Madness tickets sold out in just 22 minutes. Posted on Sep 18, 2026 Big Blue Madness tickets sold completely out in just 22 minutes this afternoon. Madness will tip off the 2026-27 Kentucky men's and women's basketball seasons on Friday, Oct. 2 at 7 p.m. at Rupp Arena. Book Game Tickets Here are more details from UK Athletics: Discover more Sports betting tips Get Basketball Shoes Book Game Tickets LEXINGTON, Ky. - Big Blue Nation has risen to the occasion once again, claiming all available tickets for this season's Big Blue Madness presented by Ronald McDonald House Charities of the Bluegrass in just 22 minutes. The tipoff event for the 2026-27 Kentucky men's and women's basketball seasons will take place on Friday, Oct. 2 at 7 p.m. at Rupp Arena at Central Bank Center. Additional event details, including schedule information and broadcast details, will be announced at a later date. For fans who were unable to claim tickets, SEC Network+ will stream the event live. Fans are also encouraged to save the date for the return of Big Blue Madness Fan Fest presented by Kroger, which is set for Saturday, Oct. 3. Additional details regarding Fan Fest activities and programming will be announced soon. UK Athletics strongly discourages fans from buying or selling their Big Blue Madness tickets. Additionally, ticket holders should be aware of the potential risks of posting pictures of their tickets, specifically the barcode, on the internet in any way. For more information about ticket security, visit ukathletics.com/ticketing/ticket-security/. SafeTix returns this season as an additional feature on mobile tickets. To fight fraud, Ticketmaster launched SafeTix, which uses an encrypted barcode that automatically refreshes every 15 seconds, or a tap-and-go ticket stored in a fan's digital wallet. The process for accessing mobile tickets has not changed; however, with SafeTix, screenshots or recordings of tickets will no longer work for entry. Fans may still transfer tickets through their accounts and the UK Athletics App. BookGame Tickets All patrons require a ticket to Big Blue Madness, regardless of age. Fans interested in purchasing new men's basketball season tickets for the upcoming year are encouraged to submit their interest here. Season ticket pricing information is available here. Fans interested in new lower-level season tickets that are available with a capital pledge commitment may contact the K Fund at (859) 257-6300 or [email protected] to learn more. Fans interested in women's basketball tickets can visit here or contact the UK Ticket Sales team at (859) 257-1818, option 1 to learn more. Single game ticket information will be available in the coming weeks. Discover more College football news College sports blog College football analysis For the latest information on Big Blue Madness, visit UKAthletics.com and follow @UKAthletics, @KentuckyMBB and @KentuckyWBB on social media.

Register first, pay later: Oasis Live '27 fixes its prices before the queue opens. Oasis announced a 38-show stadium tour for 2027 on Monday, and the ticket sale that goes with it looks nothing like the one that put Ticketmaster in front of two regulators. There is no general onsale. Fans must register by 4pm BST on Thursday 17 September, wait to be allocated a code, and buy inside a named window. Standard UK prices are published in advance at £71.50 to £266.60 including fees. For anyone who runs a sale that sells out in minutes, the change in method is the story. What did Oasis actually announce? Thirty-eight stadium dates across the UK, Ireland, mainland Europe and the United States, starting with five nights at Celtic Park in Glasgow from 21 May and finishing with four at Knebworth in September 2027. Manchester's Etihad Stadium gets eleven shows in June. Richard Ashcroft supports on every date, according to TheTicketingBusiness. The buying process is the part organisers should read twice. Everyone who wants a ticket registers first, even people already on the band's mailing list. Registrants pick up to three cities in order of preference. Automated, bulk and bot sign-ups are screened out. The lucky ones receive a unique, non-transferable code between 24 and 27 September, which unlocks one city, one purchase window and a maximum of four tickets. UK sales are then spread across Friday 25, Saturday 26 and Sunday 27 September, with three separate windows each day, so no single moment carries the whole country's demand. Why does this look so different from 2024? Because 2024 went badly, and expensively. When Live '25 went on sale in August 2024, roughly 14 million people tried to buy around 2.2 million tickets worldwide. UK fans queued for hours, then found the standing tickets they had been looking at had quietly become a second, dearer tier once the first sold out, with prices reported climbing from £135 to more than £350 at the front of the queue. The UK Competition and Markets Authority investigated and, in September 2025, took formal undertakings from Ticketmaster. The regulator did not find real-time algorithmic pricing. What it found was tiered pricing that buyers had not been told about, and "Platinum" tickets sold at roughly 2.5 times standard prices with no extra benefit over comparable seats. Ticketmaster agreed to give 24 hours' notice when tiered pricing will be used, to show price ranges to people entering a queue, to tell buyers promptly when cheaper stock runs out, and to stop using labels that imply a better product when there is none. It made those commitments without admitting liability and must report compliance for two years. In Ireland, the consumer watchdog went further and brought two alleged offences against Ticketmaster's Irish operation earlier this month. So Live '27 is not just a tour announcement. If Ticketmaster handles any of the inventory, it is the first large-scale test of rules written in response to the same band's last sale. The band did something the regulator could not force on anyone: it printed the price before opening the door. Everything the 2024 queue got wrong, from hidden tiers to surprise totals, is neutralised by that one decision. What does this mean for event organisers? Three things, and none of them requires a stadium. Registration before purchase is now the default for scarce inventory. LA28 collected 12 million registrations before selling a single ticket, and Oasis is running the same playbook with a stricter gate. The mechanism is simple: collect names first, screen them, then route each approved person to a specific window with a code. That is conditional logic and attendee routing, the thing registration software is supposed to be good at, applied to the sale itself rather than to the form. If your launch event or annual conference sells out in a morning, a registration window before the onsale spreads the load, gives you a clean list to check for duplicates and bots, and hands you a marketing audience before you have taken a penny. The registration tools you already own can do the first half of this; the code-per-window half is a matter of discipline about when you open the form. The alternative Tired of Fee Announcements? Go Flat eventcloud charges one subscription with no per-ticket fees, so platform news stops being budget news. Publish the all-in price, then hold it. The single most consequential line in Monday's announcement is a price range that includes fees. The CMA undertakings only bind Ticketmaster, but every buyer who has read about them now expects the same from you. Put the total on the event page, not on the last screen. If you use tiers, say so in advance. If a "premium" ticket carries no extra benefit, do not call it premium. Staggered windows beat one big bang. Nine UK sale windows over three days is queue management by calendar rather than by waiting room. A mid-sized conference can copy this in miniature: members on Tuesday, waitlist on Wednesday, public on Thursday, each with its own code. It costs nothing and it means a server hiccup at 9am does not eat your whole launch. The bit the fixed price does not fix. A published price range removes the surprise at checkout. It does nothing about the money that leaves the room behind it. Live '25 grossed about £397 million across 41 shows, per TheTicketingBusiness, and on a percentage-plus-fixed fee model the platform's share of that grows with every ticket sold. Multiply 2.2 million tickets by whatever the booking fee is and you have a very good year for the ticketing vendor, earned on the day of the onsale, before a single fan has walked through a turnstile. That is the quiet lesson for organisers who sell tens of thousands of tickets rather than millions. The Oasis fee is baked into a range the band chose to publish, which is honest. It is still a fee that scales with success. A registration platform priced per user rather than per ticket does not behave that way: the bill for 500 registrations and the bill for 50,000 are the same subscription, and a sell-out is a good day rather than a billing event. eventcloud charges per user per year, with unlimited events and unlimited tickets on that seat, and payments settle in the organiser's own Stripe account. The pricing page shows the seat; the maths on what a sell-out costs on a percentage model is on its 500 / 5,000 / 50,000 comparison. What to watch between now and 27 September. Whether the leaked 42-date sheet, which matched all 38 announced dates, turns out to have four more shows in it. Whether "standard" prices are the whole story or whether hospitality and VIP packages sit outside the £71.50 to £266.60 band. And, most usefully for the rest of the industry, whether nine windows and a registration gate produce a calmer weekend than one queue did in 2024. If they do, expect every promoter with a hot onsale to copy the format by Christmas. Stop paying to succeed Run your next event on Flat pricing. Unlimited tickets, registrations and events. One price, no matter how big you grow.