For black-shirted devotees of metal-rockers Metallica, no concert tickets at all might be just the ticket.
Primo seats to the ever-grimacing band's upcoming performance in the round at Winnipeg's MTS Centre (about 15 per cent of the total number of tickets) are to be sold using Ticketmaster's "paperless ticket" system, meaning that it will be a swipe of a credit card or driver's licence, and not the standard rectangular piece of paper that gets fans into the building. The system has been used sparingly in the United States (most recently during AC/DC's recession-defying Black Ice tour) and at London's O2 Arena, but never before in Canada.
"It's the best mechanism we've found so far to make sure tickets end up in the hands of the fans who initially purchased them," Ticketmaster president Eric Korman told The Globe and Mail.
Traditionally, many of the most favoured tickets to concerts and sporting events end up in a secondary market, where street-corner scalpers and more reputable online middleman services such as StubHub! and Ticketmaster's own subsidiary TicketsNow resell seats at inflated values. With the paperless-ticket technology, the purchased ducats are non-transferable - there's nothing to change hands. For the AC/DC concerts, approximately 3,000 seats were of the ticketless variety.
Being squeezed out are the ticket-resell outfits, says Sean Pate, with San Francisco-based StubHub!. "Ticketmaster is trying to stop scalping, but they're essentially trying to close off the market and dominate it even more than they already do," asserts Pate. "They're closing the loop on the re-saleability of the tickets that they choose to go paperless."
Ticketmaster may be attempting to stop scalping, but the development of the paperless system originally came courtesy of Tom Waits.
The cult-hero singer-songwriter wanted to get his tickets into the hands of his fans for a recent tour, and not price-hiking resellers.
Moreover, the use of the paperless mechanism is employed only when the artist and the promoter involved choose to use it.
Ticketmaster was criticized earlier this year for tickets showing up on resale sites before being available for purchase by the public. And in another highly publicized snafu this February, Bruce Springsteen fans were redirected to TicketsNow through Ticketmaster, even though regularly priced seats for a New Jersey concert were still available. Ticketmaster apologized (citing a computer glitch) and announced a policy in which it would no longer allow tickets to be prelisted in the TicketsNow marketplace prior to the event's initial on-sale date.
But a recent Wall Street Journal report pointed out that Neil Diamond tickets that ended up on the premium ticket site TicketExchange.com (owned by Ticketmaster Entertainment Inc.) got there by the decision of the artist, Mr. Songs Sung Blue himself.
"What people don't understand is that we're an agent for the other players in the value chain," said Korman of Ticketmaster. And while there's been some online griping about the drawbacks of the paperless system - the non-transferable tickets are unwieldy for fans to unload at face value if they cannot, for whatever reason, attend the show - the anti-scalping solution has its merits.
"Somebody needs to take the first step in putting some control over the best seats," says the MTS Centre's Kevin Donnelly, who, with the approval of Metallica and tour promoter Live Nation, has set aside 2,500 seats. Tickets go on sale Saturday for the Oct. 12 concert in Winnipeg; other Canadian venues for the Metallica tour are not going the paperless route. Donnelly admits scalping probably will never be eliminated entirely. "I just hope the scalpers will figure Winnipeg is not worth the hassle," he says, "and move on to another city."
