Maoilbheannacht
Refugee
- Joined
- Jul 24, 2005
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- 2,400
For those of you who have been keeping up with how the concert industry has been slowly trying to combat scalpers (aka ticket resellers), there has been a development thanks to AC/DC and Ticketmaster.
Over the weekend, a Dallas show for AC/DC went on sale and the only way you could purchase your ticket is by means of paperless tickets. The entire building was sold this way. Through doing a paperless ticket, it means that there is nothing physically available for sites like StubHub or eBay (or anywhere/anyone else looking to resell the ticket). For example, if I bought 3 pairs of tickets, and walk in 3 times with 3 different people, I’d have to pay 100% for 3 tickets and can only resell 3 as opposed to up to 6 (if it was a show I wasn’t interested in going to.) Waste of money for the ticket reseller, not to mention a heck of a headache to manage. The reselling market dries up as a result.
According to an industry source, this is most likely the way U2 will go with their concert ticketing for next year. Also, the source said that Live Nation will partner with Ticketmaster for the ticketing: “U2 is the biggest client and they don’t want to risk something going wrong with their system while they are still working on it.”
Now, the only issue with a paperless system would be the amount of swapping that happens between fans from city to city, and even between General Admission and seats. I’ve been a part of multi-city General Admission trades and I know how helpful they can be. This will impact this type of fan-to-fan help…but I’d take this inconvenience over having to deal with the ticket resellers ANY day!
Paperless Tickets For 2009 Tour?
Basically, you bring your credit card to the venue and as you go through, you swipe your card and it lets your whole party through, but everyone has to go through at the same time one after the other. If you bought 4 tickets with the credit card, all 4 people must go through one after the other.
This should knock out the ticket resell market and make it easier for the fans. But, U2 may not sellout shows as fast as they did on the Vertigo tour.
I guess another problem would be fans who did not have a credit card, or could not use a credit card to purchase tickets. But the number of people just walking up to the ticket master booth and paying with cash these days must be very small.