Ticketmaster's North American Head of Music talks about the battle against ticket-touting

Historically, the thought of a string of sell-out U2 shows in Dublin and Belfast would have been the basis for a major celebration on the part of the band’s Irish fans. For months, there’d be something extra special to look forward to. However, the launch of the band’s most recent Irish tour dates was followed by a slew of headlines about tickets being re-sold for upwards of ten times their face value.

Fans want to know how this happens. And the simple answer is that technology and the use of artificial intelligence is at the heart of the problem. Robots – or bots as they are known – are used by ticket touts to bombard a ticket-seller’s site the moment the sale of tickets begins. The scale of this onslaught is sufficient to ensure that touts secure tickets. The only question usually being: how many?

At the time of going to press, the most expensive ticket on any secondary site for the U2 Dublin shows stands at €1,750. What’s perhaps most frustrating is that there has been little agreement as to where the root of the problem lies. For some – incuding Fine Gael’s Noel Rock and Sinn Fein’s Maurice Quinlivan – big secondary ticket sites, such as Stubhub, Viagogo and Seatwave (which is owned by Ticketmaster), are contributing to the problem, by in effect encouraging the re-sale of tickets at a profit.

During 2017, Noel Rock was hopeful of introducing legislation which would make it illegal to re-sell tickets for more than face value. However, his anti-ticket-touting bill was quietly shelved at the time, and now seems to have been well and truly buried. Add to this the fact that, while his own party was in government, the IDA provided funding for ticket re-seller Viagogo to set up offices in Limerick in 2015, and a sceptic might wonder whether there is any real political will to address the situation. Against that challenging backdrop, Ticketmaster – who are by far Ireland’s biggest ticketseller – are taking an initiative which they believe could be a real game-changer.

VERIFIED FAN

David Marcus is Ticketmaster’s Head of Music in North America. He briefly stopped off in Dublin recently, ahead of delivering a Keynote Speech at the Eurosonic Festival in The Netherlands. A former entertainment attorney, David joined Ticketmaster in 2005 and was given the task of improving services for bands when they are touring. He left the company in 2009, before returning in early 2017 as Ticketmaster was preparing to roll out its ‘Verified Fan’ scheme in the US. He has become a powerful advocate of the new approach.

Ticketmaster take the view that making it a criminal activity to re-sell tickets will simply drive the ticket-touting market underground, rather than eliminating it. In contrast, the Verified Fan initiative aims to give preference to real fans.

The way it works is this: music fans are asked to register online in advance of their chosen gig going on sale; and to identify the show they want to attend. The system then uses artificial intelligence to determine which fans are likely to actually attend a particular gig, aiming to weed out the bots and the ticket scalpers. Verified Fan, in other words, is a real attempt to dismantle the market for secondary ticket-selling itself, rather than simply banning it.

“We knew there was a big problem here,” David Marcus reflects, “and we came to the conclusion that first-come, first-serve ticketing was not working to the consumers’ advantage, or indeed to the artists’ advantage. Yes, it’s a great solution to selling tickets fast and selling out concerts fast. But that’s not necessarily in everybody’s interest. We have scalpers who are running a really effective business and creating an entire secondary market – which isn’t helping artists or fans.

“If the middle men are getting in the way, then we as a business are not doing a great job of empowering an artist in their relationship with fans. We have recognised that. So the answer has to come from the mechanism itself – and the mechanism of first-come, first-served is the weakness.”

CAN FANS GET LEFT OUT?

This is where Verified Fan comes in.

“Verified Fan in its current incarnation is our first attempt,” David explains, “at distributing tickets based on identity, as opposed to based on time and the luck of the draw. With Verified Fan, we use a series of algorithms, based on a bunch of incoming signals, to try to predict what an individual is going to do with the ticket if they’re permitted to buy it.”

There is an inevitable concern that the technology used to detect bots may not be fool-proof, and that real fans will still be left out. Or that people who are music fans but don’t have a big online presence – whether on Facebook or elsewhere – may not be identified as a “fan” under the system’s algorithm. Is there any way that real music fans can be assured that they won’t be left out of the Verified Fan loop?

“Let me clarify one misconception,” says David, “Verified Fan does not rank people based on how ‘big’ a fan is. Verified Fan doesn’t say ‘Oh, you’re obviously the biggest Ed Sheeran fan and this other person is just a casual fan: we’re going to let you in and not them’. It does not do that. In the most basic terms, it asks – based on the information you have provided to us – whether you’re likely to go to the show or whether you’ll re-sell your tickets. It’s that simple – but it’s a test that makes all the difference.

“Are we right 100% of the time? No. Currently, we’re right about 95% of the time, and we know that, because we see only 5% of the tickets that we distribute through Verified Fan getting re-sold, on average. That’s the figure after 64 tours in 2017 – which we believe is a good result. Are there some fans who may be accidentally left out? It’s possible. Are we constantly getting better? Absolutely. And we will continue to.”

TAYLOR SWIFT TIX

The most widely reported application of Ticketmaster’s new idea was when they collaborated with Taylor Swift for her latest Reputation tour. During a highly-publicised campaign, fans who wanted tickets could be ‘boosted’ by a variety of means. They signed up to ‘Taylor Swift Tix’ months in advance and were then assessed, based on the level of their devotion to the singer.

Some fans were boosted for things like watching Taylor Swift music videos, signing up to the Taylor Swift fan site, or (and this was the headline-grabber) demonstrating how willing they were to pay for Taylor Swift albums and merchandise.

While the campaign does seem to have effectively driven out scalpers, there was some resistance. A number of fans refused to buy tickets, and Taylor Swift herself was accused of being greedy. On the other hand, she has already proven herself a more than capable business woman – and David is firmly convinced, that the campaign was a success.

“People are afraid of change,” he argues. “I think that’s where a lot of grumbling came from on this. Taylor Swift is a lightning rod for a lot of the issues: people love to criticise her. But the reality is that the post mortem on that tour was successful.

“Out of all the people who participated in the Taylor Swift Tix programme, only 25% spent a penny extra, while the other 75% didn’t spend anything other than for the tickets themselves. Every single fan who participated in Taylor Swift Tix had the opportunity to buy pre-sale tickets. Nobody was left out. What we were hearing was that the fans loved it.

“To be clear about it, it was customised for Taylor, based on the conversations we had, with her and her team. We constructed something that was tied to her album release, something that was tailored for Taylor and her fan-base – and she knows her fans better than anybody else.”

MAKING SECONDARY SITES REDUNDANT

While a full post-mortem on the Taylor Swift campaign won’t be conducted until her Reputation tour ends this summer, Ticketmaster is eagerly planning to push ahead with its Verified Fan platform. It will be implemented for the first time in Ireland with the upcoming Elton John: Farewell Yellow Brick Road date in Dublin’s 3Arena. While any change in the market here is likely to be scrutinised carefully by politicians and music fans alike, it is also almost certain to be welcomed hugely by music fans.

Apart from anything else, Ticketmaster see it as a way of getting to a place where their own Seatwave platform – which competes in the secondary market with Viagogo and Stubhub – will, along with all the rest, become redundant.

“We’re trying to get rid of this market,” David Marcus says. “That’s what this initiative would effectively do. From our perspective, banning re-sale is not the right thing to do. You can ban re-selling, but you can’t hold back the market.

“We all live in a borderless world on the internet. Laws can only go so far, to solve the problem. Tickets and money move around the internet freely, so you can ban something in one place but it will just show up somewhere else. And the profit motive for the middle men is still there. What we want to do is get to the root cause.”

If they can achieve that, then Ticketmaster will have done the music industry some service.