FYI Paul McCartney Tix Are Already On Sale & Scalpers Are Going To Town

If you thought that ticket presales for Sir Paul McCartney's upcoming tour started tomorrow, we have some bad news for you.

As it turns out, a separate presale to the one being hosted by official tour promoters Frontier Touring is already quietly under way via Ticketmaster and Ticketek, having kicked off last night at 5pm, and ticket resellers are already taking advantage, with several passes already available on resale platform Viagogo.

The little-advertised ticketing presale was supposed to be for registered members only, but can be accessed easily via McCartney's website and use of the publicly displayed password 'PAUL1ON1ANZ', which takes users through to already-available tickets for the rock legend's tour this December.

And scalpers are capitalising in a big way. Ticket prices for the Perth presale officially range from $123.72 (Silver) to $409.18 (Diamond) — and other cities are comparable, within a few dollars — but resellers are flogging off freshly bought tickets for at least $50 more than the minimum price, and well beyond.

Today, The Music has seen Silver tickets in Melbourne going for anywhere from about $175 up to $921.24 — though those higher-end tickets were swiftly reduced to between $350 and $400, still several hundred dollars higher than their primary market value — and even $1474.02 for a central back-section seat in Sydney.

There were also Platinum tickets, which retail for about $245, depending on city, for sale in Sydney for about and over $500, as well as Gold tickets ($174.70) being sold for over $450.

That's far from the worst of it; in Perth, a pair of front-and-centre seats are being sold for $6159.13 per ticket, with centre seats behind the sound desk on the platform for $2093.77 a pop.

Also in Sydney, a reseller is asking for $5896.07 for those premium front/centre seats, though they found it in their heart to drop the price from $8844.10.

Brisbane's prices are a little more "reasonable" — though we use that term loosely — with pairs of front/centre seats being resold for between $1100 and $1300 each. That's actually cheaper than seats a section back, for which the going rate is between $2000 and $3000. In Melbourne, the highest price we saw (though likely not the highest in general) was $3685.04, down from an initial asking price of $4422.05.

Buyers are certainly not disincentivising the behaviour, either, with less than 5 per cent of available tickets for each Australian gig still up for grabs at the time of writing.

This all follows months of high-profile tours falling prey to having their tickets snapped up and then sold instantly by unscrupulous scalpers, with acts such as Ed Sheeran (a couple of times) and Harry Styles, among others, having previously been at the centre of wildly inflated ticket resales.

Frontier's member presale kicks off tomorrow, 29 June, at 2pm AEST. General public sales follow on Tuesday 4 July.

See theGuide for tour dates and details.