Live Nation Unveils Plans For Digital Wristbands To Combat Ticket Fraud
Friday, 26 March 2010
Written by Nigel Sachdev
Live Nation have revealed plans to combat ticket fraud, and online scams, with new technology requiring festival and gig-goers to wear digital wristbands.
The world's biggest concert promoter, who recently merged with Ticketmaster to form the vertical live-music megacorporation Live Nation Entertainment, are experimenting with "smart-chip" technology to stamp out ticket fraudsters.
Digital wristbands have already been experimented with at smaller festivals, but are expected to be introduced at major outdoor festivals in the near future.
"Your ticket won't be a paper ticket, it'll be a wristband unique to you," Live Nation's John Probyn told BBC Radio 1's Newsbeat, "If Fred Bloggs comes in, I can ask him for identification to prove he is that person."
Besides gaining entry to the event, the digital wristbands could also reportedly allow fans to prepay for food and drink, and possibly other merchandise too. It is not clear though whether these new measures would do more harm to secondary sellers than it would to combat fraud.
Secondary industry brokers, and fan-to-fan ticket marketplaces, are sceptical that these new inititives will only further to exasperate the problem of online scams by forcing music and sports fans to take more risks when purchasing tickets for sold out events.
Ed Parkinson, director of fan-to-fan exchange site viagogo UK, argued fans have a right to resell their tickets if they decide not to attend.
"If someone has spent their hard-earned money on a ticket that they can no longer use, then they should have the right to sell it on, whether it is a paper ticket, e-ticket or any other type of ticket".
"The most important thing is to make sure that when someone buys a resold ticket, they get what they pay for, in time for the event."
Despite the impression that all resold tickets sell above face value, data provided by Stereoboard.com suggests that only around half of all events currently available with UK fan-to-fan exchanges Seatwave, viagogo and GetMeIn, are on sale above the promoters original ticket face values. The majority of tickets available for resale are below face value - sometimes just a fraction of the original prices set by the artists and promoters.
According to recent research, 1 in 12 music fans have been the victim of online scamming after purchasing tickets for live events from websites setup by online fraudsters.
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