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With the summer concert season in full swing, the Fans First Coalition aims to ensure that fans have greater access to reasonably-priced tickets and enhanced protection against fraudulent business practices. It also wants to educate fans and advocate for industry and legislative changes in how tickets are secured, marketed and sold.
It combines giants of the entertainment industry — among them, Live Nation and Ticketmaster, with more than 30 recording artists (Dixie Chicks, 3 Doors Down, Gavin DeGraw, Citizen Cope, more), pro sports teams and more than 60 entertainment venues throughout the U.S.
“The Internet has revolutionized the ways fans access and purchase event tickets. At times it creates an unfair situation for fans looking for reasonably-priced tickets,” Michael Marion, the president of Fans First, said.
For one thing, he said, bogus, non-sanctioned sites trick fans into believing they are buying tickets directly from the artist or venue rather than the resellers who operate them. Many resell tickets they don’t even have: Fans don’t know that these are applied for on spec and that they could end up shut out of an event they’ve paid for.
“The Fans First Coalition seeks to put an end to these practices and ensure fans have a good event experience, from ticket purchase through the final out or encore.” added Marion, who is the general manager of the Verizon Arena in Little Rock.
In most cases, fans excited about seeing an act type in the name of the artist or venue into a search and find several of these agencies. The fans, not thinking about price, agree to whatever it costs to get in. Scalpers who scoop up the tickets in the blink of an eye, rendering an event a sellout, are essentially extoring customers.
“Our band wants our tickets to be sold at the face value that we set, so that the real fans can get the tickets — not scalpers,” said Maroon 5 lead singer Adam Levine.
The trio of “Wiseguys” who admitted skirting online security systems and snatching more than 1.5 million primo concert, baseball and theater tickets were sentenced to federal probation and nearly a half-year’s worth of community service last month, with one ordered to pony up more than $1.2 million.
The $25 million worth of tickets the three principles of Wiseguy Tickets Inc. re-sold were for shows by Bruce Springsteen and Hannah Montana, among others, as well as playoff games at Yankee Stadium and Broadway plays.
The California trio — Kenneth Lowson, 41, Kristofer Kirsch, 38 and Joel Stevenson, 38 — were arrested as part of a campaign by state and federal authorities in New Jersey to crack down on scalpers who bleed fans willing to pay anything to see their favorite acts.
Thanks to a computer programmer in Bulgaria, the California boys set up a network of computers out of their Nevada-based headquarters that impersonated individual visitors to Ticketmaster, Telecharge, Tickets.com, MLB.com, MusicToday and LiveNation, among others.
They also created and managed hundreds of fake Internet domains (such as stupidcellphone.com) and thousands of e-mail addresses.
The conspirators then jacked up the prices and sold the tickets to brokers — who, in turn, boosted the costs even higher.
For Springsteen alone, the seven-year operation bought nearly 12,000 tickets in late 2007, according to U.S. Attorney Paul J. Fishman in Newark.
Besides swiping tickets for, among others, Bon Jovi, Barbara Streisand, Billy Joel, and Kenny Chesney at the IZOD and the Prudential Center, the ring picked off ducats for “Wicked” and “The Producers,” as well as the 2006 Rose Bowl and 2007 Major League Baseball playoff games at Yankee Stadium.
The other venues are in New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Houston and various other cities.
Neither employees at the company nor ticket vendors who bought through Wiseguys Inc. had any idea what was going on, Fishman said.
“Ticket-scalping has moved from back-alley transactions into a multi-billion dollar industry.” TicketMaster said in a statement. “This is a positive development, but it represents just one front in the fight against scalping and illegal bots that threaten the fan experience.”
Another front is Fans First, which has its official launch this afternoon.
The Fans First Coalition is a 501(c)(4) non-profit organization dedicated to educating members of the general public, policy makers and consumers on issues related to improving access to reasonably-priced tickets, and enhanced protection against fraudulent business practices. Operated by a Board of Directors, Fans First brings together fans, hometown theaters, artists, sports teams, and prominent voices in entertainment. Go to: StandWithFans.org
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