The Mexican President asks Bad Bunny to perform at a free gig after the Ticketmaster controversy

Bad Bunny has been asked by Mexican President Andres Manuel López Obrador to hold a free concert in Mexico City after hundreds of fans were turned away from his show over the weekend following another debacle with Ticketmaster.

Obrador gave Puerto Rican-born rapper and singer Benito Antonio Martínez-Ocasio some resources for a show at the Zocalo Square, a plaza in the Mexican capital.

I ask Bad Bunny, I know he’s exhausted and tired because he works so much, but I’m asking him to consider the possibility of coming to Mexico, to the Zócalo. We can’t pay him. “It has to be cooperation,” Obrador said during a news conference Wednesday morning.

While Obrador said he wouldn’t be able to compensate Bad Bunny, 28, for the show, he said the government would be able to pay for the lighting, stage, sound system and even a zip line.

He continued, “I will tell him how deeply it affected us to see the young people sad that they could not enter, because they had duplicate tickets, because they were victims of fraud.”

The request came several days after hundreds of fans were saddened and disappointed after being turned away from the sold-out Bad Bunny show in Mexico City Friday night.

They were the latest to run into trouble with distribution giant Ticketmaster.

Vulture reported that hundreds of attendees were denied access to the Estadio Azteca venue, which has a capacity for 87,000 people. Fans were allegedly informed by the venue that their tickets were not valid.

In addition, the stadium’s general admissions segment appeared a full half minute before the musician appeared on stage.

Many frustrated and angry fans reported spending hours traveling to the Estadio Azteca in the Mexican capital, paying hundreds of dollars for a ticket.

The West Observer reported that a fan said they purchased their rejected ticket directly from Ticketmaster.

“I paid over 9,000 pesos for a ticket at Ticketmaster (about $455) until they tell me my ticket is fake!”

Ticketmaster Mexico later apologized and said that affected fans would be fully refunded.

“The Estadio Azteca venue issued a statement of its own saying that any duplicate tickets became invalid, causing tickets purchased from Ticketmaster to be cancelled,” Vulture wrote.

Mexico’s consumer protection agency has since announced an investigation.

Ticketmaster Mexico said the event was well received but denied that the concert was oversold. A company statement said that 4.5 million applications were received for only 120,000 seats. It added that the counterfeit products then denied entry to some legitimate ticket holders.

The company said that an unprecedented number of counterfeit tickets that were not purchased through our official channels were displayed on Friday at the gates, adding that the situation at the entrances had caused ‘temporary outages in the ticket reading system, which unfortunately are momentary’. Recognition of legitimate tickets hindered.

This is Ticketmaster’s latest bad publicity incident.

More than two dozen Taylor Swift fans are suing the outlet and its parent company, Live Nation, accusing them of fraud, misrepresentation and antitrust violations over the failed Eras Tour ticket sales.

An attorney for the Swifties, as Taylor’s fans are known, told NPR that as many as 400 fans have expressed interest in joining the court case seeking $2,500 per violation under California’s Unfair Competition Act.

The US Department of Justice and several state attorneys general are also looking into Ticketmaster’s practices.