Grande, Bieber, Coldplay for LN Manchester benefit

Ariana Grande will return to Manchester this Sunday (4 June), headlining a star-studded benefit in aid of the families of the victims of last Monday’s bombing.

One Love Manchester, underwritten by Live Nation and produced by Festival Republic in association with SJM Concerts, will take place at the Emirates Old Trafford Cricket Ground (50,000-cap.) and feature performances by Grande, Justin Bieber, Coldplay, Katy Perry, Miley Cyrus, Pharrell Williams, Usher, Take That and 1D’s Niall Horan.

Tickets will go on sale through Ticketmaster at 10am on Thursday 1 June, while those who attended Grande’s tragic show at Manchester Arena on 22 May can register to attend for free.

All net proceeds for the show, which will be broadcast on BBC TV and radio and Capital radio, will be donated to the We Love Manchester Emergency Fund.

“We will not quit or operate in fear. We won’t let this divide us”

In an open letter to fans, Grande (pictured) – who postponed her Dangerous Woman tour in the wake of the Manchester Arena attack – says: “My heart, prayers and condolences are with the victims of the Manchester Attack and their loved ones. There is nothing I or anyone can do to take away the pain you are feeling or to make this better. However, I extend my hand and heart and everything I possibly can give to you and yours, should you want or need my help in any way.

“We will not quit or operate in fear. We won’t let this divide us. We won’t let hate win… Our response to this violence must be to come closer together, to help each other, to love more, to sing louder and to live more kindly and generously than we did before.

“Music is meant to heal us, to bring us together, to make us happy. So that is what it will continue to do for us. We will continue to honour the ones we lost, their loved ones, my fans and all affected by this tragedy. They will be on my mind and in my heart every day, and I will think of them with everything I do for the rest of my life.”

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1D turn down £1m to endorse resale site

One Direction turned down an offer of over £1 million to endorse a prominent secondary ticketing website, it has emerged.

“1D got offered a seven-figure sum by a secondary ticketing company to be featured on their site, and a very large share on uplift on those highly-priced tickets,” a “source close to the band” tells the Daily Mirror. “The band flatly turned this down.”

In a statement to the Mirror, band member Niall Horan calls resale sites such as StubHub and Viagogo “terrible for music and for real music fans”, echoing the tone of the language used at the launch earlier this month of anti-touting initiative FanFair Alliance, and says the band “always thought very carefully about how tickets were priced, and so to regularly see fans on Twitter unable to get a ticket or having to pay ridiculous secondary ticketing prices was incredibly frustrating”.

“1D got offered a seven-figure sum by a secondary ticketing company to be featured on their site… The band flatly turned this down”

One Direction previously lent their support to a petition created by Mumford & Sons manager Adam Tudhope which called for the protection of music fans by properly enforcing the 2015 Consumer Rights Act.

Around a month later Professor Michael Waterson, in his review of the British secondary ticketing market, recommended just that – a decision welcomed by Tudhope and others – but disappointed others by failing to call for the criminalisation of ticket touting in the UK.

Even if 1D weren’t so anti-touting, it’s not like they need the money: the band were collectively the second-richest celebrities of 2015, behind only Taylor Swift.

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