Tour Statement from Robert Smith and The Cure
There’s no doubt that Robert Smith and The Cure love their fans. One of the biggest concerns for the musician for their 2023 tour is the pricing of their tickets on the secondary market. Even before the shows for The Cure went on sale, there were tickets listed for sale on many third party ticket reseller websites. There was a recent debacle where prices for Bruce Springsteen tickets went astronomically high on the open market. Some seats were being listed for several thousands of dollars each. Robert Smith stated he did not want this to happen to their tour and that he’d make sure the band took every step necessary to make sure it didn’t (and doesn’t) happen. To accomplish this, The Cure is taking advantage of some rather new technology from Ticketmaster called Ticketmaster Verified Fan.
Ticketmaster Verified Fan is a program designed to help prevent bots and scalpers from purchasing tickets to popular events and concerts. When an artist or event promoter decides to use the Verified Fan program, fans can register to become “verified” through Ticketmaster. To become verified, fans must provide their personal information, such as their name, email address, and social media accounts. Ticketmaster then uses an algorithm to analyze this information and determine whether or not the person is a real fan.
If the fan is verified, they will receive a unique access code that allows them to purchase tickets to the event through Ticketmaster. The code is usually only valid for a short period of time and can only be used to purchase a limited number of tickets. By using this program, Ticketmaster aims to give real fans a better chance of getting tickets to their favorite events while preventing scalpers and bots from buying up all the tickets and reselling them at inflated prices.
However, this process to ‘block’ scalpers has been tried before and there were still issues with tickets being sold on the open market for crazy prices. It seems that no matter what the process is to protect fans against scalpers, it rarely works. Tickets for The Cure have just gone on sale to the public, so we’ll shortly see how well their attempt to curb scalping works.