Promo for Harry Styles North American tour powered by Ticketmaster's Verified Fan.
Ticketmaster’s Verified Fan is being touted as a hit, despite some disappointed Harry Styles fans.
Styles, one of the members of the U.K.’s biggest selling boy band, One Direction, announced a solo album and tour April 28. The Live Nation-produced concerts are scheduled at 13 smaller North American venues, starting Sept. 19, at The Masonic, San Francisco, and ending Oct.14, at Comerica Theatre, Phoenix.
The total amount of tickets is roughly 45,000, which is not many available seats considering Styles and his band played stadiums. Hundreds of thousands of people vied for those 45,000 tickets, according to Ticketmaster, which was inevitably going to lead to heartache and questions for Ticketmaster as The Verified Fan onsale was the only way to purchase tickets for Styles' North American tour dates.
Some fans were so upset with the process that Ticketmaster felt compelled to issue an “open letter” to quell the storm. Ticketmaster said it believes 95 percent of tickets went to real Harry Styles fans, with just 2,000 tickets having so far been reposted for resale. “That means less than five-percent of all tickets are posted on resale sites,” said the letter, telling disappointed fans, “even if you did everything right and pushed the button exactly at 10 a.m., so did hundreds of thousands of others.”
“Ticketmaster Verified Fan has seen a really great response from both fans and the industry, so things are going well,” said David Marcus, EVP, Head of Music, Ticketmaster. “To date, we’ve had about 1.5 million fans register using Verified Fan.”
“Harry was looking at a massive amount of demand relative to a comparatively tiny amount of supply,” explained Marcus. “Our goal was to maximize the number of actual fans who got tickets, and we succeeded. Ninety-five percent of the tickets we distributed went to actual fans. Without the Verified Fan platform, we would have expected a vastly different volume of tickets would have been acquired by scalpers and bots, leaving fans with no choice but to buy tickets from resellers at inflated prices.”
When Venues Today checked secondary market websites, numerous sellers had Harry Styles tickets at many different, vastly inflated, price points.
“We warn fans against speculative or fake tickets that show up on secondary ticketing sites and aren’t real," said Marcus. “ Sometimes we even see tickets posted on secondary sites before on sales happen. Ticketmaster never allows spec tickets on TM+ (Ticketmaster’s secondary ticketing platform). Having said all that, the purpose of Verified Fan is not to eliminate resale. The purpose is to identify fans who we think, based on our data, are more likely to value the experience of the show over the arbitrage of flipping a ticket. We know that 95 percent of Harry Styles tickets went to fans and we saw less than five percent of tickets posted on resale sites. That suggests to us we were very successful here.”
“For Harry Styles, there were a few hundred thousand fans trying to buy 45,000 tickets,” he said. “Demand was intense and we discussed the best way to manage the inevitable disappointment that would result. Remember, this was the only way to buy a ticket for this under-play tour. As a result, everyone involved felt that this fanbase would be more disappointed if they didn’t get a shot at tickets, and so we collectively decided to give every Verified Fan an opportunity. In this unique instance, with this unique fanbase, it seemed like the fairest way to manage the onsale."
Brandon Paredes, Box Office manager, Comerica Theatre, is a fan of Verified Fan. Comercia Theatre is a 5,000-seat venue.
“With only so many tickets to go around there was always the possibility that fans who wanted to see Harry Styles would not get tickets,” said Paredes. “That is no reflection on Verified Fan. The concert here at Comerica sold out right away and some fans missed out on tickets. We’re a small venue.”
“From the consumer's perspective, Verified Fan is a way to try to prevent scalpers from loading up the system with their bots and making it impossible for people to purchase tickets,” he said. “There were lots of people who signed up for the presale on Verified Fan. They (Ticketmaster) tried it (Verified Fan) out and I think it was pretty successful, but I wasn’t the one who tried to buy tickets and didn’t get them.”
“We were getting calls 10 minutes after the onsale and had to tell people that unfortunately the tickets had already all been sold,” said Paredes, who thinks the future is bright for Verified Fan, regardless. “It seems like Verified Fan solves a problem.”
Marcus said that the response has been overwhelmingly positive and fans are happy to register since it helps to remove bots and scalpers from the ticket-buying equation.
“We recognize that it’s a new process for fans and we’re working hard to educate and build awareness on how it works,” said Marcus. “Now, this doesn’t fix the supply and demand challenge and doesn’t mean every fan will get a ticket, so it’s still upsetting not to get tickets to a show. But Verified Fan does level the playing field so a fan is up against another fan – instead of a bot – who wants the same ticket.”
So far, Verified Fan has supported a little over 30 tours, including Ed Sheeran, Twenty One Pilots, Linkin Park, Depeche Mode, Harry Styles, Norah Jones, and The 1975. The stable of future shows and artists committed to using Verified Fan is just as rich with heavy-hitters. “We’re excited about what we have in the pipeline, but can’t share any specifics right now,” said Marcus.
“At its core, Verified Fan helps content owners like artists, promoters, and venues make sure their tickets are more likely to be purchased by actual fans,” he said. “That is a fundamentally new level of control that previously wasn’t available to artists and their touring partners.
Marcus said that Ticketmaster has also tied the program to a “gamification” layer that allows tours to reward their most engaged fans – biggest social promoters, music purchasers, etc. – with better access to tickets. “The ability to activate a fanbase and engage them in the tour and music release in return for a better seat is a brand new opportunity,” he stressed.
Kevin Neal, Hawks Tickets, does not think Verified Fan will thwart many determined secondary brokers. “First, no one knows, but it’s assumed that Verified Fan blocks someone from using the same IP address to sign up for the program,” he surmised. “Okay, but that’s not going to stop anyone from creating various accounts using different names and different IP addresses. There are plenty of programs that change your IP address every few seconds. It’s all going to depend on how deep Ticketmaster’s safety-nets go.”
Neal compared Ticketmaster’s attempts to stop the scalpers and bots to a chess game. “Every time Ticketmaster makes a move to make sure the tickets get into the right hands, the people buying up all the tickets are going to have their next step. It’s a game that will go forever.”
Ticketmaster is rolling out Verified Fan to artists for whom it makes sense given the demand profile of their tour, the risk of abuse by bots and scalpers, and the expectations of the fan base. “We expect the platform to evolve dramatically over the coming year, and are excited for what we expect it to become,” said Marcus.
“When we turn our attention to who is buying the ticket and prioritizing that over when they are buying the ticket, ie., how fast do they get through the shopping experience, we can delight fans and make ticket buying fun again,” Marcus added. “That is the future of Verified Fan.”