Eric Church plays to a sold-out crowd at Target Center, Minneapolis, Minn. (Photo Credit: Reid Long)
Eric Church has been on a Don Quixote-like quest for the past few years to smack down scalpers who he says snatch tickets from the hands of his true fans. He's tried paperless tickets that require photo ID's, sweeps of purchase orders to make sure that no more than six tickets are attributed to the same household, and this week, flat-out canceling more than 25,000 tickets for his spring tour that he suspected were purchased by scalpers.
"We've been doing this for a quite a long time… trying to identify tickets that have been purchased for the purpose of reselling them to make money," said Fielding Logan of Church's management firm, Q Prime South. "We're not talking about a fan who buys four tickets and then sells two because of some circumstance. It's super-organized scalpers who are technologically savvy."
The best inventory for each show (around 3,000 tickets per) was protected and sold through a fan club presale that Logan estimated had at best 1-2 percent scalper activity. With an average ticket price of $40-$50 in the general on sale, the estimated value of the canceled tickets was more than $1 million. Asked to guess what the resale value was on those tickets, Logan put the figure at likely double — or $2 million-plus.
The Q Prime team has been fine-tuning a proprietary technology over the past few years to attack the problem, but never on this scale. With Church's tour slated to kick off on Thursday (Feb. 23) at Bankers Life Fieldhouse in Indianapolis, Fielding said the team has spent years poring over order lists to ferret out buying patterns or suspicious activity – such as big orders of tickets from cities far away from a given show – and searching for other clues that tip a scalper's hand, then automating the review process to cancel out those tickets.
The result? A system that, in this case, had a reported accuracy rate of 99 percent.
The process has created what Logan called a "scalper's blacklist," which is automatically checked against a new order list, then paired with some good old-fashioned, "labor intensive" sorting that involves many, many man hours of searching. That dragnet does occasionally sweep up a genuine fan, in which case the person is given an email support address where a member of the Q Prime team can sort out the issues.
Another method Church's team uses to disincentivize scalpers who are not as easily spooked is by telling them they can have their six tickets if they don't try to change the name on the order and if they show up at will-call with a photo ID. "At that point they'll usually either reinstate their order or cancel it," he said.
The efforts have the full support of the "Holdin' My Own Tour" promoter Louis Messina of The Messina Group. "Eric is on a mission, and I love that instead of talking about it, an artist actually does something about it," Messina said. "To me it's healthy for the business all over. It sickens me when we are trying to keep our tickets in a good price range and we go online and tickets are selling for $1,000 each and the artist doesn't share in any of that money."
Messina knows Church could be charging much more than he is for the top-tier tix on his tour, but he agrees that paying five times the face value is a lose-lose for fans and the artist. As to why the team waited five months after tickets for the 65 shows went on sale, Messina said it's a laborious process and management wanted to make a big statement by doing it all at once to get the message out.
"We're not gonna stop here," he said. "This won't be the only time we do this."
But what happens when a legitimate fan is targeted and their tickets are canceled out? "We engage them and they typically will send us a screen shot of their travel confirmations," Logan said. Or, in the case of one group from Nashville, a three-minute slick video including sad puppy dog faces and a narrative explaining their rather large ticket purchase. "We're always glad to reinstate an order when we have mistakenly caught a fan," he said.
A California ticket reseller (who preferred to remain anonymous) said the statement from Church's team noted the action was targeting scalpers (not bots) and companies like hers buy and resell tickets by having their employees queue up like "everyone else" during on-sales. "We don't use bots, and these seats went on sale on Sept. 5, and now it's five months after… My main concern is for how long he's waited to do this and what it does to the people who bought tickets legitimately and lost them… I assume if it was bots, they should have been able to notice it quickly." A spokesperson for the NATB had not returned requests for comment at press time.
The point, of course, according to Logan, is to ensure as accurately as possible that the people who are in their seats at each of Church's shows are true fans who paid a fair-market price for their tickets. Given the broker's concerns, how confident are they in their methods?
Of the 25,000 canceled tickets, Logan looked at a spreadsheet of orders and saw that 336 tickets – or 85 orders – had been reinstated at press time. "I feel like that's a very, very small percentage of the overall tickets. There's another 5,000 or so on this tour that we're pretty sure are scalpers, but I don't want to have my error rate go from 1% to 3% and that many more customer service issues because we got too aggressive," he said.
Anecdotally, he added, when they find they've made a mistake and reinstated tickets, fans say they understand and are appreciative. "Real fans get the big picture,” he said.
StubHub spokesperson Glen Lehrmann said in a statement to Venues Today that: "As a secure marketplace, StubHub supports the rights of fans to buy, sell and transfer tickets safely. For every event listed on StubHub, buyers and sellers are protected by our Fan Protect Guarantee. In the rare occurrence a buyer runs into an issue, StubHub will find replacement tickets or offer a full refund."
Logan's team does sometimes struggle when they identify someone who is probably a fan but has, say, bought 14 tickets and Q Prime decides to bump them back down to the allowed 6-per order limit as a precaution. "One reason the limits are there is to give more people a chance to buy six tickets to a hot show," he said. "We wrestle with that and acknowledge that it could be a real fan, but the other reason is to spread the wealth. Our long play here is to make it be one of the most painful acts for brokers to leach onto."
Some of the affected dates had as many as 1,200 tickets nulled, some just over 100. There is a cost involved in doing things this way – one Logan declined to specifically enumerate – but between the staffers and interns in the Q Prime South office and one or two hourly workers who are brought in to help, he said it is well worth the effort to engage with, help and reassure fans who are impacted.
If all goes as planned, Logan said brokers and scalpers, who are buying tickets across many different tours, will feel so much pain from Church's team that they will simply stop trying. Publicizing the strategy with press releases and interviews is part of that plan.
And he's already seen results, as the final show to go on sale — an April 22 date at US Bank Arena in Cincinnati that was put up after the cancelations – appeared not to have buys from groups that purchased on many other stops. "We did 12,000 tickets after the first day on sale and I feel the strategy is working to drive them to softer targets or other artists," Logan said. "A happy byproduct from a managerial point of view is that Eric is coming from a place where he is trying to look out for his fans, which is a win-win for him and his fans."