Country music artist Eric Church has cancelled 25,000 tickets for his North American spring tour after discovering that they were purchased by scalpers.
The tickets for his spring tour will be re-released today (Tuesday) for the remaining stops of the 60-city US tour, while cancelled tickets for his Canadian tour have already been put up for resale, with further tickets for shows in Washington and Oregon going on sale on February 27.
Church has cancelled tickets purchased by scalpers for several of his individual concerts previously, but never on this scale.
“They buy thousands of tickets across the US, not just mine, and they end up making a fortune,” Church said. “They use fake credit cards, fake IDs. All of this is fraud.”
Several methods have been tried by Church to quell the reselling of tickets for a profit in the past, including paperless ticketing, increasing the price, and developing the screening of purchases through his fan club, according to one of the performer’s managers, Fox News reported.
In a report last year, investigators in New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s office cited a single broker that bought 1,012 tickets within one minute to a U2 concert at Madison Square Garden when they went on sale on December 8, 2014, despite the vendor’s claim of a four-ticket limit. By the day’s end, that broker and one other had 15,000 tickets to U2’s North American shows.
The report said third-party brokers resell tickets on sites like StubHub and TicketsNow at average margins of 49 per cent above face value and sometimes more than 10 times the price.
Church’s new tour is among the top 10 global tours with ticket prices averaging $60.67, according to Pollstar.
“Our fans know that as long as we tour, we’re going to do everything we can to make sure they pay face value for the ticket,” Church said.
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