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.
