Ticketmaster To Utilize Paperless Ticket System For METALLICA Show In Winnipeg
April 2, 2009, 15 years ago
Brad Wheeler from Theglobeandmail.com is reporting:
Tickets to METALLICA'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."
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