What is the fastest sold out concerts ever?
It is a great challenge to decide which concert can be deemed the fastest sold-out event in the world. It is difficult to identify how fast tickets are being sold given that many artists and bands are touring in different parts of the world every year. However, one concert does stand out as having sold out at lightning speed: a Swedish pop group, ABBA, during their 1979 London concert.
As the curtain fell in the number one spot in several countries. Their albums such as "ABBA", "Arrival", and "ABBA: Hits in this album had been Internationally successful albums with tens of millions of album sales around the world. They were prominent throughout Europe and enjoyed immense sales in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and some South American countries as well.
ABBA toured extensively in the 1977-1978 world tour and then did not tour again for over a year because they concentrated on songwriting and producing new music. It is quite ironic that by mid-1979 the audience’s demand for the band was growing more and more intense. When ABBA declared they would be giving a single concert on 13th September 1979 at the Wembley Arena in London, literally a feeling of joy burst out.
Tickets for this event were to be sold before the date of the event, this was done on 26 of August the same year. It broke every rule and defied conventions that were in place for pop music. This shows that to control the large crowds of fans, barriers were put in place around ticket-selling points. Telephone lines were occupied for hours as many people tried to get through their potential ticket vendors. In the end, all the tickets that were put up for sale were 8000 and they were all sold out within only three hours. It was stated that some people were willing to pay £100 (around £500 or $650 today) for tickets, as this became more or less a ticket for a musical fairy-tale. It remained arguably the quickest-selling concert event and to this date, there has not been a concert event that sold out as fast even years later.
It only made sense that ABBA fever had become so intense partly because the fans were eagerly waiting to get a glimpse of the band in action. But it was also because ABBA had attained perhaps a preposterous popularity as pop icons in popular culture. In their music, combining pop hooks with Eurovision melodies, they had gathered a large number of fans of all ages and origins. Its airplay in both pop and rock stations as well as other related stations, listeners across different ages particularly middle aged and above also fueled the demand. What was more, their style of dressing (with the women glistening in their shiny mini dresses while the men were covered in flared jumpsuits) had made them build a very solid brand image that the attendees could easily identify with.
The concert itself was performed in an extremely vast outdoor venue constructed on one of the parking lots of Wembley Arena. They were lined in the concrete lot, and they had to stand for the entire time for a show that lasted for hours. The sources contemporary to the event described it as a grand: high energy Abba extravaganza with stunning costumes, sequences as well and set changeovers in the two full hours of live favorite hit performance.
Hear what the reviewers had to say about the relationship that was established between the band and the euphoric crowd, which can only have originated from that raw energy that had been built up in the ticket sales process, with 8,000 tickets sold in the shortest time possible, a record for the band. The band was said to have delivered an excellent live show as a result of the low morale of the crowd.
Even though, to some extent, so many performers could then have without delay declared considerably more far-reaching follow-up tours. They would only have one more live appearance in 1979 and they wouldn’t perform a full concert ever again. But they preferred again to continue with the studio albums and promotional videos only. However, they only put out their two biggest-selling LPs, Super Trouper and The Visitors over the next few years. But as a live act, they would disappear totally by 1982 as members had to look for other projects to handle or were facing such issues as divorce.
Therefore, apart from a few numbers on TV and specials, the only live concert by ABBA, which the fans had the chance to witness was the September 1979 Wembley Arena concert. It is thus now fondly regarded as a very special, almost sacrilegious occasion in ABBA mythology. This is more unimaginable interest and subsequent ticket stampede that drives popular concerts such as the Beatles at Shea Stadium in 1965, Elvis Presley’s Aloha from Hawaii concert in 1973, and the only Abba concert. Many other bands have witnessed sell-out in record time following this, however, none has come close to matching Abba’s record; despite rock critics and fan polls voting Abba’s single ‘Wembley’ as the fastest-selling concert in history in 1979.
Thus, for ABBA fans, the missed opportunity to see this group in concert has been felt as a loss even decades later. And for those few thousands who crammed Wembley Arena on that mid-September night over 40 years ago, there is nothing quite like the triumph of being the envy of all.
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