Ticketmaster Wants to Let You Buy Tickets Before Bots Get Them All
You hear that your favorite music artist is coming to town, so you go buy tickets and find that they are already sold out. These tickets were not picked up by people with faster fingers than you, but they were bought by bots to resell. Ticketmaster Verified Fan hopes to change that.
These bots are a serious problem for all parties involved. In fact, scalpers generate about $ 8 billion in secondary sales annually. This means higher ticket prices for you and less money for approved sellers and artists. The Verified Fan program can help resolve the issue by registering real fans on event pages, social media, email, or the artist’s website. Once you’re verified, you can buy pre-sale tickets before the bots arrive.
Ticketmaster tested the program with a few small tours earlier this year and it has been working very well so far. David Markus, head of North America music at Ticketmaster, told Recode that less than 1% of tickets sold through the program ended up being resold. Now their program is expanding with presale tickets for Ed Sheeran this week and hopes to expand it even further.
To register, you must check each individual event to see if a verified fan pre-sale is available . If so, you register with your personal information through the Ticketmaster event page, the artist website, social media page or the Ticketmaster artist mailing list. Registrants will be randomly selected. If you are selected, they will send you a code in a text message that you can use to purchase pre-sale tickets.