TICKETING SOLUTIONS, DEEP SOUTH STYLE

Like all box office managers do, Mark Arata, box office manager, Smoothie King Center, New Orleans, wants tickets to get into the hands of real fans.
“It gets very hard because we are a destination city and we try to prevent the blatant use of bots by the brokers,” said Arata. “If you look at the accounts and see the same guy from New York City buying pairs of tickets from 50 or 60 different accounts, with the same address, it’s fairly easy to figure out this is a broker.”
Arata described a particularly transparent attempt by scalpers to buy up the tickets to a recent Twenty One Pilots show at Smoothie King Center.
“The first batch of tickets were released and all bought by brokers,” said Arata.
“There was one city in California that had all the sales. They used different names and address but what are the chances that everybody in Costa Mesa, Calif., wanted to come to New Orleans to come to a Twenty One Pilots show?”
About 600 tickets sold during the first round of the on sale were released — 550 of which were so suspicious that they were canceled. “We were only able to cancel the tickets because we use a print-delay system where tickets are only available two days before the show.”
Ticketmaster took it off sale, and put it back on sale, through Verified Fan. “It didn’t sell very many tickets because not many people had signed up for Verified Fan yet,”
said Arata.
The move did “slow down the known brokers,” he said. “But I’m a little leery of it (Verified Fan) because they have no way of knowing if they are just verifying the brokers.”
Selling tickets at market value is another way Arata sees as a solution, but he also pointed out the reluctance of artists and promoters to offer up expensive tickets during the primary on sale.
“They (the primaries) don’t want to be seen selling $500 tickets,” he said.
He used a recent Bruno Mars show as an example. “Bruno sold out in four minutes with $125 tickets. Thirty seconds later, you look at the secondaries and the tickets are listed at $300 to $500, and they got scooped up.”
“The tickets could have sold at reasonably higher prices to begin with, and people would have bought them,” said Arata.
Arata does not think the BOTS Act will be of much help, either. “There’s only one real way to stop this,” he suggested, “and that’s to force will-call where the fans have to show up at the venue with an ID to get their tickets. Brokers are not going to fly to New Orleans to pick up their tickets and distribute them.” — Brad Weissberg