10 Reasons Why Ticketmaster’s Paperless Tickets Won’t Work

It appears the oh so clever Ticketmaster has yet another bright idea:

Why not introduce paperless tickets so they never change hands and at the same time make it harder for scalpers to profit?

Let me give you a quick rundown of how it would work…

After buying your tickets online, you would show the credit card used to purchase them and a piece of government ID to enter the show. No tickets to remember, nothing to forget, no worries right?

Ticketmaster thinks they are doing a favour to the consumer by implementing this new service, but I think this is one issue that consumers and brokers could both agree is a bad idea.

Here are 10 reasons why paperless tickets won’t work:

1. I bought the tickets so why don’t I have the right to resell them? Since when did Ticketmaster take ownership of my tickets? I should be able to sell them if I want, just like anything else I own.
   
   
2. Ok so the option of selling my tickets is gone. What happens if I can’t make it to the show? I would like a refund then. But wait, that won’t work because there is no way the promoter is going to allow refunds on ticket sales…so I guess that means I’m basically screwed?
   
   
3. The majority of fans still prefer ticket stubs as a memento. When I purchase tickets to a show I want to be able to hold them, show them off, frame them or whatever I feel like, not just look at my credit card statement and try and remember what that $200 charge was for. I want to wave my ticket stub around and brag to people that I got to sit in the 1st row.
   
   
4. What if I don’t want to bring my credit card to a show because I know I’ll get drunk and think it’s a great idea to spend $50 on a crappy t-shirt and buy everyone else beer. I would rather just bring enough cash thanks.
   
   
5. What if I used a prepaid credit card to buy my tickets? Or what if the credit card I used to purchase my tickets expired, or I have a spending problem and I decided to cut it up and throw it in the garbage? How are they going to scan that?
   
   
6. This service would be yet another excuse for Ticketmaster to charge us another “convenience fee.” Oh wait, I guess that’s not a reason why paperless tickets wouldn’t work, it’s just another reason for fans to hate Ticketmater.
   
   
7. Because I purchased the tickets on my credit card that means I’m the one that has to show up to the concert. What happens if I want to buy the tickets as a gift and give them to someone else?
   
   
8. Tickemaster is publicly trying to get rid of scalpers so they appear trustworthy to the consumer but we all know that’s not the case. They are going to try and play off this service as an attempt to win over the consumer by doing them a favour but we all know Ticketmaster is in the ticket scalping business themselves with the purchase of TicketsNow.
   
   
9. Ticketmaster claims that their new paperless ticket system will eliminate the waits in line to purchase tickets, but really how many of us actually wait in line the night of the show to buy them anyway? This new system claims to eliminate that, but it won’t.
   
   
10. Stubhub, Ebay and other major secondary ticketing sites are not going to put up with this. Ticketmaster is trying to eliminate scalpers, but where do we sell? We sell on these huge websites. No scalpers means no profits for them and trust me, they’re 10 steps ahead of everyone else. Let them take care of everything and paperless tickets will either be a fad, or a thing that never was.