Elton John fans hoping to secure tickets for the Dublin date on his Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour — billed as his last — are being offered access to a new system Ticketmaster says will help defeat touts.
However, to use Verified Fan, consumers must be willing to hand over personal information including their email address and phone number. Ticketmaster declined to explain how it will use this information to distinguish fans from touts.
In an interview on Newstalk last year, Keith English, managing director of Ticketmaster Ireland, said the system would use “sophisticated software to look at [consumers’] social media activity and other things to try to identify if they’re a genuine fan or not”. However, this weekend, Ticketmaster said Verified Fan would not trawl fans’ social media.
Verified Fan’s terms and conditions for the Elton John show, the first for which the new technology is being used in Ireland, state that consumers’ contact details will be passed to a third party for analysis. In the case of customers who already have Ticketmaster accounts, it will assess previous purchasing history. Information collected about consumers will be passed to Elton John’s management, promoter and record label.
Fans needed to have signed up to Verified Fan by Thursday, February 1, to get pre-sale tickets from Wednesday, February 7. The main tranche of tickets will be released on February 9.
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Verified Fan is Ticketmaster’s bid to address the problem of touts snapping up tickets and selling them at inflated prices. It owns two ticket-resale websites, which levy hefty fees on consumers buying resold tickets, often at inflated prices.
Other artists have opted to tackle touts by placing restrictions on the resale of tickets, such as by printing purchasers’ names on them and requiring ID to gain entry. This approach was taken by Ed Sheeran for nine Irish dates in May.
David Marcus, head of music at Ticketmaster North America, said: “The decision to [use] Verified Fan happens at tour level between the artist and the promoter. It’s not a Ticketmaster decision.”
Marcus said Verified Fan was “identity-based ticketing” that had “all kinds of amazing applications outside of the direct ticket transaction”.