Twenty One Pilots, the Grammy award-winning alternative rock band, has employed Ticketmaster’s new Verified Fan programme in an effort to combat scalpers for its upcoming Tour De Columbus.
The band sold over a million copies of its 2015 ‘Blurryface’ album in the US, achieving two top five singles in ‘Stressed Out’ and ‘Ride’. Twenty One Pilots have played more than 260 shows in the two years since then, with the upcoming events in their home city of Columbus, Ohio to be the finale.
The sold-out dates start on June 20 and end on June 25. The venues range from the 300-seat Basement, to the 18,809-capacity Schottenstein Center.
“We employed two different versions [to prevent scalping], one we felt we can control and have complete control, that would have been the smaller shows and going so far as to make sure every fan that bought a ticket, when they showed up they have to present an ID and then they walk into the venue,” Twenty One Pilots manager Chris Woltman told Forbes.
“So you can do that on these smaller rooms, when you’ve got 300 or 1500 people. It gets very challenging or problematic when you’re going into an arena for 12 or 13,000 people. So we used the Verified Fan piece really to just put this into the hands of the fan base, and to go through the systems and the obstacles and the checkpoints that the Verified Fan component would do.”
Ticketmaster’s Verified Fan requires fans to enter a host of information to verify their identity. Based on a fan score, they will get a code that can be used for a specific presale. It is hoped Verified Fan will discover and bar bots attempting to access scores of tickets.
Ticketmaster’s vice president and head of music, David Marcus, said that through its On Tour division, the firm has been working with Twenty One Pilots and its management for a long time.
“They’re doing something unique at home, it is the kind of event that lends itself to scalping, just by the very nature – tonnes of demand, special shows, limited supply. It’s a recipe for fans getting screwed and so we said, ‘You have a problem, we have a solution and we can do this in a way that is good for everybody involved,’” Marcus told Forbes.
The Verified Fan feature, which began testing last year, has already been hailed by the likes of Ed Sheeran and Ticketmaster’s chief digital officer and executive vice-president of data science and engineering, John Carnahan.
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