The paperless concert ticket is now here and the question is, will it make attending an event any easier?
The Miley Cyrus tour will be the first to use electronic ticketing, announced Ticketmaster yesterday, and the scalpers and secondary ticket brokers are pretty sore about it. Why? Because electronic ticketing makes it just about impossible to scalp or resell a ticket, especially if it's a bar code on your iPhone like some see coming in our future.
Ticketholders for the Cyrus tour are required to bring the credit card they used to buy the ticket as well as a form of photo ID. This basically puts everyone on the "Will Call" list, which can lead to untold hassles as anyone who's ever been on that list can tell you. Will it make the lines longer? Probably at first until the system gets shaken out, but electronic ticketing doesn't seem to be a problem at the airport any more.
And how is it that of all artists, it's Miley Cyrus that leads the charge into the new market? Disney really tries to keep the prices reasonable because they know that their events are for the family. If you exclude too many family members because of price, it hurts their brand more than most. Plus, scalpers caused an absolute fiasco during the last Cyrus tour that even caused some congressional hearings as a result.
The secondary ticket market is furious and apprehensive, as one can imagine, because if paperless ticketing catches on, they're dead. But it will be so nice to be able to buy a ticket at face value for a change. And it will be just as nice to actually have a chance at a great seat without having to pay the premium charged by the resellers.
It almost makes the service charges acceptable.
4 comments:
Although Miley seems to be doing a nice thing and "leads the charge into the new market", she is actually just scalping the tickets herself! Don't believe everything at face value. Read this: Miley Cyrus Cuts Out The Middle Man And Directly Scalps Her Own Tickets http://www.authoritytickets.com/?p=140
The artists (and venue and promoter) scalping their own tickets is yet another problem that's been covered here in the past. It was easy to get away with when no one knew about it, but with more and more attention and a poor concert economy, hopefully will see the self-scalping come to a halt soon.
And you actually buy that? Her ticket price went from about $50 to $100 with service charges, most of the best seats are VIP at $299 + so the average Miley Cyrus fan gets stuck paying more for the same crap they got before! And as a monopoly do you think they will start charging less? Should everyone who wants to attend a concert be required to pay service fees and own a credit card? Should your friends take the chance that three of their friends are going to pay them back since only one can charge the tickets? Good luck with this one.
I absolutely agree with you about convenience charges being a total drag and have posted here frequently about them. The point is that maybe (we can't be sure yet) the average fan can have a chance at getting a good seat at face value (however inflated that might be) without having to endure the markup of a middleman ticket broker.
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