Miley Cyrus Tour The First To Paperless Concert Ticket

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.

Variable Priced Concert Tickets

The thing that everyone hates about concert ticketing these days is the ever elevating prices that gouge music fans everywhere. On the other hand, if these fans are still willing to pay the price, it's hard to complain about the hole in their wallets.

One proposal to stabilize prices a bit is to create a demand-based, variable priced ticketing market similar to airline pricing systems.

On premium shows, the cheap seats (similar to the coach seats on a plane) get more expensive, and the best house seats (equivalent to business and first class) go to the highest bidders. The prices also increase ahead of the start time as supplies shrink. As you get closer to departure, the price is going to be a lot higher than if you bought a ticket a couple of weeks ago.

While I doubt this scheme will ever be adopted, something has to be done about the current pricing policies. We've all been burned too many times.

Of course, Ticketmaster could probably eliminate the secondary market entirely by taking hint from No Doubt, Trent Reznor and Bruce Springsteen. No Doubt wrestled control of roughly 10 percent of tickets on its current North American tour and implemented its own sales terms. Reznor and Springsteen's plan includes direct sales to their Tour Club members, and prints buyer names directly on the tickets to prevent subsequent resale.

Ticket prices are just like Wall Street in that greed abounds. Ticketmaster, the promoters, agents and now even the act are all responsible for wanting more and more. Just like Wall Street, they're going to find that there's a limit to greed before it backfires on you.