PreferredSeat.com Blog

Justin Bieber fans found out last night at the KFC Yum! Center  in Louisville what happens with paperless tickets when the ticket scanners failed. When the doors opened and the fans brought out to swipe their credit cards to obtain their paperless tickets they were sent to a resolution window to stand with thousands of disappointed fans.

It’s not clear if or how many fans may have been left out in the cold when Justin Bieber took the stage but there were a lot of angry Justin Bieber fans before the concert started. Much of the experience of attending the concert was dampened with the uncertainty that the fans would even be let into the concert.

Imagine the problems you can run into if you buy tickets from your cellphone as promoters are proposing. A dead battery, lost phones, scanner problems, and the list goes on when you move away from hard tickets. With passionate fans such as Justin Bieber has, you don’t want to mess with thier Justin Bieber tickets before the concert and not expect some backlash.

The new paperless tickets being sold for many of the popular concerts these days by Ticketmaster to stop the scalping of tickets has only made it much harder for parents to buy concert tickets for their own kids without attending the concert also. And most fans already know it doesn’t stop the reselling of tickets, there’s just a little more work involved.

Several recent articles have pointed out the problems some fans are having with the new paperless ticketing including one for a Lady Gaga concert by Oregonlive.com and another from the Torontosun.com for a Justin Bieber concert.

Ticket brokers have found a way around the paperless tickets so they only seem to create problems for the fans. So hopefully they will find a better solution than one that makes it a pain in the butt for fans to attend a concert.

Michael Buble performed in Sacramento at the Arco Arena last night and you expect that he would have sold out the venue but that was not the case. For his Sacramento concert Michael Buble only sold out the lower level seating and the rear of the upper deck. Much of the upper level went unsold for one of the most popular artists on tour today.

And for the recent concerts by Carrie Underwood, Tool and the American Idols at the Arco Arena it was pretty much the same thing, fairly empty in the upper level. And Carrie Underwood usually has no problem selling tickets for her tour dates as the top country artist, but she only sold about 9,000 tickets for this show.

Even the Justin Bieber concert scheduled for Friday October 22nd at the Arco Arena has not sold very many upper level tickets though he has sold out concerts throughout his current tour. It doesn’t help that the kid is selling VIP packages at $391 per ticket for a cash starved city, but he wouldn’t understand what the parents buying his tickets are going through anyway.

A big part of the problem with the Sacramento area is not only the economy, but the fact that so many California state workers live in Sacramento and they have had so many furlough days resulting in a reduced pay of about 10%. Many Sacramentans have no extra income for entertainment any longer and concert tickets just don’t fit in the budget this year.

Sacramento is not the only city having problems selling tickets for concerts and other entertainment events. And some cities such as Pittsburgh do very well selling out multiple concerts and the Wells Fargo Center. But the lack of ticket sales will probably keep most of the major acts out of the Sacramento area for some time to come and those that do come to the Arco Arena may not sell out as they usually do.