Social media has done a world of good today. A mother took to Facebook to find a liver for her sick son, and Adele fans go to Twitter to complain about ticket resales.
Anthony Parello Survives Liver Disease thanks to Facebook
Antony Parello, 14, was born with a rare condition called biliary atresia. This causes inflammation in the bile ducts, and it damages the liver progressively until it fails. This condition is diagnosed in 1 out of every 18,000 newborns. A transplant is the likeliest way to a full recovery.
Parello’s mother went to Facebook as a last resort, as hospitals were nowhere near getting a transplant in time. In the end, a long lost acquaintance answered to her post, and she turned out to be a match. Kendra Perpich, Minnesota resident, saved Anthony Parello’s life.
Facebook Connects Donors with Transplant Patients
Perpich donated a part of her liver to Anthony, who received surgery just last week. The doctors declared that Anthony should make a complete recovery, as the minor transplant will help the rest of the liver regenerate. He will be able to engage in any physical activity his age and condition allow.
Meanwhile, Adele Protects Her Fans from Scalpers
We’ve all seen ticket resellers outside concert venues. Adele is about to bring those nasty crooks down, and her management has joined hands with Songkick to do it. The singer’s 2016 North American tour will be the first since 2011, which she was forced to cancel because of a vocal chord hemorrhage.
Her 2016 North American tour tickets went on sale last week, and all dates were sold out within minutes. As it turns out, not all sales were handled by StubHub. Eight percent of all sales were handled by Songkick.
Songkick Protects Adele Fans from Resellers
Songkick is a website that sells and manages tickets that are sold through an artist or band’s website. They sold 235,000 tickets legitimately to fans in an attempt to block about 53,000 sales to people who were suspected of having intentions to resell them for higher prices. Songkick assures to sell tickets at the right price.
Twitter Gets the Good and the Bad from The Ordeal
In the end, Adele saved her fans about $6.5 million, even if they don’t know it. A lot of fans took to Twitter to complain about the record time in which tickets sold out. There were a lot of delays on her website and on Stubhub, and then the tickets were gone. Truly enough, Adele’s management did this for their own good.
For her UK tour, Songkick managed 40% of Adele’s tickets. Resales have been a hot and popular topic in the live-event world. Scalpers have been generating total captal of aroudn $8 billion from reselling tickets at an impossibly high price to unsuspecting music and live act fans. There are a lot of very popular resale websites in America, like TicketNetwork and Vivis Seats, which scam clients into buying tickets that don’t exist. By the power of Adele, they will be stopped.
Adele, Mumford & Sons and Elton John Speak Out Against Ticket Resales
Adele is not the only one fighting against these efforts. Mumford and Suns have expressed disapproval for these resellers, as well as Elton John. In her own words, Adele said she does not really care for the business side of the industry, but she will always call for justice where it is due. She refused to allow her album to be available on streaming websites like Spotify or Apple Music to encourage purchases and to honor the time-old tradition of selling your own albums.
The singer has had a great year in terms of speaking out against fame, the music industry and artistry in general. She has expressed that she doesn’t want to be the face of anything, and that aside from her throat getting operated on, not much has changed. Her new image, more mature and polished than how we saw in 21, shows her transformation into an older Adele. She is unapologetically her, restricted to being defined solely by her music.
But that doesn’t mean she won’t use social media and media in general to do things her way. She is currently fighting the unfair fight of streaming services to dumb down album sales, and the artist’s control of their image and their work and the reselling industry. All while slaying in her own way, with wicked winged eyeliner and killer cheekbones.
