stay in the shallow end

Last night, my friend told me about MusicToday’s policy of invalidating tickets that were sold on Ebay or Craigslist for above face value. I completely rejected the possibility that this could be true until she pulled up the NBC29 article about it. I wracked my brain to figure out how MusicToday or Dave Matthews Band could possibly think this is a good idea, but came up short. Today, the story resurfaces on cvillenews with a link to a Daily Progress article with a few more details. Here’s what Pat Jordan, the manager of Dave Matthews Band had to say:

“We want to serve the fans and get as many tickets into the fans’ hands, not into the hands of brokerage firms,” he said.

Wow, taking your fans that are willing to pay top dollar for your product and then completely screwing them over is serving them? Sign me up! He also said:

… the group spends a lot of time and energy telling fans where to buy tickets and where not to buy tickets.

It’s been all-Dave-all-the-time in Charlottesville for the last couple of weeks. You can’t turn around without hearing about it in some way, shape, or form, and the first I’m hearing about this policy is the day before the show. I subscribe to the Craigslist For Sale feed, and have NetNewsWire set to keep the last 30 days worth of posts. Searching for “DMB” I get 123 listings and for “Dave” I get 130 listings. I’m sure some of those overlap, but in any case, exactly zero of those are any sort of warning about purchasing tickets for above face value. You’d think if you were ”…spending a lot of time and energy telling fans where to buy tickets and where not to buy tickets…”, you would post warnings in the very first place they would go to buy tickets to a sold-out show.

This policy has nothing to do with serving the fans. It’s a shot across the bow to scalpers and ticket brokers saying, Keep reselling our tickets, and your reputation, and possibly your business as a whole, will be ruined. As for the fans that get screwed? Well, they’re just collateral damage. MusicToday pretty much confirms that:

“Unfortunately, that’s true,” said Del Wood, chief operating officer of Musictoday. “There’s no way to notify a third party. We want to take care of the primary fan.”

The “Unfortunately…” in that sentence really rubs me the wrong way. It’s not “unfortunate” when it’s MusicToday’s policy and MusicToday’s broker prevention department that are screwing these fans that most likely had no idea they were doing anything wrong. At that point, it’s deliberate. MusicToday’s only saving grace is this comment by the arena’s general manager:

Wilson said this search-and-invalidate action is a trend among artists and is being driven by them individually, not ticket vendors.

So it’s possible that they had no say in the matter, but that begs the question: Why do they have a broker prevention department? And of course, the overarching question: Why does anyone care?

Well, I think I have it figured out. Let’s start at the Warehouse, the official Dave Matthews Band fan association. It’s a little club built to “serve the fans”, and for your $35 annual membership fee, you get access to:

• Members-only website with news, photos, audio and video clips, message board, store and live chat room
• Annual membership packages
• Gallery of members’ works

Big deal, right? There is one more item on the list though: Opportunities to purchase tickets in advance of public on-sale. Now I don’t think it would be a stretch to say that a good number of ticket brokers and scalpers are members of this fan club, and take advantage of the pre-sale offers. These scalpers are probably consuming a disproportionate amount of the pre-sale allocation, which in turn makes the fan club membership less valuable to the regular members. Would you pay $35/year for news, photos, audio, and video clips (aka marketing materials)?

By removing the incentive for scalpers to buy advance tickets, the value of a fan club membership increases substantially. More people join, less people quit, and MusicToday and Dave Matthews Band enjoy extra revenue.

Everything I know about MusicToday and Dave Matthews Band makes me want to believe that my conclusion is wrong. What gets me is that there are other ways they could achieve what they are saying they want to do without pursuing their current course of action. If they are only interested in the “primary fan”, they could make tickets will call only. They could also tie tickets to the purchasing credit card which would have to be swiped as you walk into the venue. I’m sure with a little thought, they could come up with a half dozen solutions that don’t end up screwing those who have done nothing wrong, but it seems their primary concern was to put the maximum hurt on the brokers without regard for anyone else.

So in the end, this policy will “serve the fans.” Unfortunately that only includes the fans willing and able to pay $35/year to show how committed they are.