PreferredSeat.com Blog

Paperless tickets are being pushed by Ticketmaster at the same time states such as New York and Minnesota are looking into banning them. The question is who has the rights to the tickets after they are sold. Ticketmaster wants to retain all rights to the tickets by using paperless tickets which require a credit card to purchase and to get into the venue on the night of the show.

Most ticket brokers such as Preferred Seating and ticket resell sites are against the paperless tickets because they cannot be resold, the buyer has no choice but to pay with a credit card, and they have no right to sell, give away or even not show up for the show if they want to get anyone else in with the tickets they bought on their card.

If Ticketmaster succeeds then they will also have a complete monopoly on tickets in both the primary and secondary ticket markets. They could do whatever they want with ticket prices because nobody could ever undercut them.

And to force everyone to have a credit card to buy a concert ticket is wrong too. It’s bad enough it’s hard too find an outlet close by to buy tickets from with cash but with paperless tickets you would never have the choice to use cash.  Fans should not be required to have a credit card to attend a concert, plain and simple.

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.