I feel like the New York Comic Con has a done a good job preventing scalpers from ruining the experience for its customers with Fan Verification. Since it was implemented I haven't had to worry about tickets being sold out in minutes.
That's an interesting approach. San Diego Comic Con takes the approach of making you jump through so many hoops that only obsessives can make it through the processes.
To buy a ticket, you have to create an account to buy a ticket before the ticket sale date is announced. Once the date is announced, you are no longer allowed to create a new account for that year's sales. Then you get assigned an hour-long time slot in the far future during which you have to be actively present online to enter a lottery to see if you have the chance to even buy a ticket. Then you have to buy the kind of ticket you want before that batch sells out.
And if you went the previous year, there's a whole different set of rules to figure out of how to maintain your eligibility to buy a ticket the next year with it's own different set of dates and forms to fill out.
All of this is incredibly hard to figure out if you don't spend your life trying to figure out how to buy Comic Con tickets. There are multiple dates you have to plan around and you have to show up during your 1-hour purchase window even if it's in the middle of the night for your ___location.
So while it prevents most scalping effectively, I personally think it's a crappy experience and a crappy solution.
I just don't get it. For almost any event I can barely gather the enthusiasm to raise myself from my rather pleasant sofa, cope with the trauma of travel and missing that night's TV not to mention the "oh god how do I get home again" nightmare.
I guess it’s a choice between watching show X in comfort or standing in line for 6 hours for a chance to spend 10 seconds with an actor/actress from show X. Probably not even the main star as they have better things to do. Put it like that and it’s a no-brainer.
Knowing ticketmaster, they would milk such a verified fan program for all it's worth. They'd want full access to the user's social media information for instance.
> The most elaborate (and controversial) example of this so far was Swift’s choice to offer “boosts” that could be procured by buying her album several times (on her website, from Walmart, from Target, from iTunes), buying merchandise, engaging with sponsors on social media, or watching her music videos. The boosts supplement Verified Fan and sort fans into a line, with the most dedicated — measured both in time and money — bumped to the front.
Swift’s choice to offer “boosts” that could be procured by buying her album several times
I am really shocked and disappointed, Tay-Tay always seemed so nice. Whereas you would expect it from, say, Metallica, who take contempt for their fans to a new level
There's usually more than one perspective. How else do you identify real fans from people that sign up to get presale codes? Rewarding those that are part of a fan community is pretty easy if you have that info. The fact that you can easily track all that is a little disturbing, though.
Making fans buy more than one copy of the same album is pretty low. If it was just “buy all the singles” then at least you would get the B-sides or remixes too. I am a big fan of T-Swizzle but I like her a bit less now.
If that's true, yes, it's pretty crappy. It could also be an unintended loophole brokers discovered that allows higher likelihood of getting a verified fan code, which wouldn't surprise me.
Are you only thinking about her public marketing image? I feel like any amount of digging into who she is as a person makes this "nice girl" thing way more complicated...
Are you only thinking about her public marketing image?
Sure, I am aware of that, but making fans buy multiple copies of the same album to be in with a chance of spending even more money on a concert ticket is part of that image too.
Hardly. As someone that works for a broker, it is exceedingly hard to get verified fan to work at scale, and you burn that account and work put into it after it's used. I know a broker that was buying access to gmail accounts that had been around a long time, facebook accounts with lots of activity, and using AT&T phones to get the verified fan SMS. The cost was about $40 for the gmail/facebook accounts, not including the phones. According to him, both accounts and the phone number are basically unusable for verified fan afterwards. That's not a system that scales easily for brokers, and even if they scale costs them a lot to implement, which means it's only useful on things you're sure will go up quite a lot in value.
In short, it's not what I would call a lottery for scalpers.
Combined with Amex's new tour limits for amex presales (not on all tours), where they limit you to two purchases per tour per person owning an amex (doesn't matter if you have 10 cards, two orders total), and the fact that they heavily fingerprint to identify and and wedge up brokers by putting in waiting rooms, and I find the idea from the article that the primary market department of Ticketmaster is actively working with brokers at any scale laughable. It's an arms race between the people that are entirely willing to ignore the AUP and TOS (there's a spectrum here) and Ticketmaster, and has been for years.
Presumably the ticket is tied to the purchaser's id in some way (picture, name, or payment info) and at the event ticket holders need to present such information. It'd be a trade-off against people who can't make it to the event being out of luck (no way to resell), but stopping more of the scalper's bad behavior. You could alleviate the trade-off by tying the ticket to a second factor like a CC that you could entrust to a friend for the event, or allowing more refunds before a certain date.
If you throw the entire event yourself, you get to sell tickets however you want. Some bands that use TM have enough leverage to do presales or lotteries for their fans before the main sale on TM.
Most acts, at most venues, are forced to use Ticketmaster/Livenation/StubHub, because That's Just How It Works.
Louis CK made a splash a few years ago by completely avoiding ticketmaster. While a live band is very different than a stand up, I feel like if bands cared they could try something very similar.
> You win if FanDuel ever pays this bettor the full $82,610 – whether due to public outcry or any action by relevant legal authorities. I win if the bettor accepts a settlement for less, such as the tokens-of-apology that FanDuel has already offered.
They could try, but Ticketmaster owns a greater portion of the venues suitable for live band shows of any size than of those suitable for stand-up comedy, so they’d probably be a lot less successful with it. Especially if multiple touring bands tried to do it at the same time.
http://www.newyorkcomiccon.com/Attend/Badges/Fan-Verificatio...