Rethinking digital tickets? Please do!

It's not as if things can't go wrong with paper tickets.

When digital tickets were still at twinkle in the eye of Ticketmaster and MLB - and a panicked look on the faces of scalpers everywhere - I "never received" tickets for Springsteen at Fenway (August 2012). I put "never received" in quotes because what I believe happened was that I tossed the tickets out. They'd actually arrived, I suspect, but in an easily-ignorable plain grey envelope. the plain grey envelope being the discrete delivery method deployed by Fenway Park to secure tickets from those who might be inclined to swipe tickets if the envelope screamed something like SPRINGSTEEN TICKETS ONBOARD. (I always wondered about this: wouldn't ticket thieves figure the plain grey envelope thang out pretty quickly?)

Anyway, that summer I was plenty distracted. My husband was recovering from cancer surgery. ('Nuf said.) The Springsteen concert with my sister Trish was a nice break from all that. 

With a few days to go before the concert, I realized I didn't have the tickets, so I called Ticketmaster and/or Fenway, and they gave me instructions on how and when to come out to the ballpark on concert day and stand in line in the broiling sun to pick them up. 

So, yeah, things can go wrong with paper tickets, too.

But it took me a while to embrace the concept of digital tickets.

Having had a career in technology that goes back to before the days of PC's, let alone before the Internet, I was always worried about technical problems. If something could go wrong, I feared, inevitably it would.

I was comfortable with printing out tickets (and boarding passes), but I wasn't happy when, a few years ago, things went fully paperless.

Red Sox tickets were my first experience with the insistence on fully digital, and the squeeze play forcing all baseball game attendees into using the MLB app. What I found particularly distasteful about it - other than the fear factor of whether the Internet would be down or my phone stolen - was the fact that the ticket was barcode-less until a couple of days before the game.

Why, I wondered. So I called the Red Sox ticket office and the fellow told me that this was because they had to make sure that there were unique barcodes for each event, blah-di-blah-di-blah.

Huh?

I'm no math major, but aren't there like a kabillion possible barcodes out there? And you can always add another bar or two if you need a kabillion more. So what's the probability of the same barcode being issued for a Red Sox game and, say, a Foo Fighters concert three months later? 

Anyway, I finally got used to Red Sox tickets being digital and even admit that, if I make a last minute buy, it's actually pretty convenient. Still, I'm always a little nervous until I've gotten my digital ticket scanned and I'm through the turnstile.

I'm less worried about boarding passes. It's convenient to have them on the phone, if it's easy enough to print the paper version one out at an airport kiosk.

But the same fear factor I have for ballgame tickets goes for concert tickets. 

I was the designated ticket purchaser for two Springsteen concerts this year: Boston Garden in March, Gillette Stadium in August. For both concerts, I kept (relentlessly) checking on Ticketmaster and on the Google Wallet on my phone to make sure those tickets were still there. What was my recourse going to be if something went bad?

Fortunately, it didn't.

But with the rise of digitized sales, new problems have emerged. Scammers and scalpers have warped the way live events are able to curate an audience, for example. (Source: Boston Globe)

The big problems here are, of course, digital fakery (real fake barcodes, anyone?) and the secondary market for tickets, which is pretty much the Wild West. (I avoid the Wild West. For Springsteen March, I bought the tickets on the Ticketmaster secondary official scalping market, not trusting something on, say, Craigslist. If needs be, I would buy tickets through a reputable agency like Ace or StubHub.)

In the middle of this digital storm, Boston-based True Tickets was born.

True Tickets is a custodial app. 

The moment you buy the ticket on a website that uses the service, True Tickets takes over custody of the ticket.

The company tackles fraud using myriad techniques, such as issuing tickets with dynamic screens or blocking off access to the ticket until a specific time before the event. This prevents scammers from selling counterfeit tickets, or selling the same ticket to multiple buyers.

One of the issues that True Tickets addresses is online scalping. Raising prices to meet demand isn't (always) illegal. But those who are running the event (band, ball team, et al.) want that value for themselves. Thus Ticketmaster came up with dynamic pricing, and their own secondary market, which brought us the debacle of ticket prices going crazy for the first part of the Springsteen tour when it was announced last winter. (By the second leg of the tour, some of the pressure was out of the system and ticket prices were saner. I was able to snag August seats for face value, which sure wasn't the case for Springsteen in March.) But dynamic pricing and adjacent strategies puts the money in the pocket of the performer and/or event organizer, rather than in that of the scalper.

Some artists - come on down, Taylor Swift - refused to play the dynamic pricing game, so tickets purchased on Ticketmaster went for the original value. On the secondary market, of course, the prices took off. Other entertainers - Foo Fighters (I think), come on down - not only refused to play the dynamic pricing game, but they refused entrance to their shows to ticketholders who bought scalped tickets. Which didn't make fans happy who'd bought in the secondary market, that's for sure. I'm not sure how this brouhaha was resolved. There's no easy answer here...)

True Tickets’ software uses blockchain technology, so event organizers can track the ownership and number of tickets purchased by any buyer and can cancel large orders after confirming it’s not all for one party. The company also has rules and limits on how many times a ticket can be transferred to another person.

True Tickets is growing, but they're still a small player. (As of a month or so ago, they've delivered 5 million tickets.) Interestingly, their largest client is the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Managing tickets is likely made easier and better using True Tickets - among other things, they provide venues and organizations with data on ticket purchasers - but I wouldn't imagine ticket scalping and fraud are big issues for the BSO. 

I'm not sure how all this translates into much of value to those of us who buy tickets, rather than to those who sell tickets. Maybe the fact that True Tickets maintains custody of a ticket makes it more secure, but I'm not aware of any problems with tickets being stolen from Ticketmaster or MLB, which also maintain custody of tickets on their apps. 

But I still wish plenty of good luck to True Tickets. I'm always rooting for locals to do well. And if they think that they can at all improve the digital ticketing process, please do!

That said, I wouldn't mind seeing the option of having an old-school paper ticket. I never collected ticket stubs, but for those who do, a canceled ticket stub thumbtacked to your bulletin board is a lot more fun (at least for us olds) than looking at an NFT!