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Maiden arena tour: Everyone welcome, except touts

Iron Maiden and Live Nation are seeking to minimise ticket resale for the band's upcoming UK tour with named and paperless tickets

By IQ on 22 Sep 2016

Iron Maiden, Paris, 2008, Metalheart

Iron Maiden perform in Paris in 2008


image © Metalheart/Wikimedia Commons

Iron Maiden are, in partnership with promoter Live Nation and ticket agency Ticketmaster, introducing a series of measures designed to prevent the touting of tickets for their upcoming UK arena tour, the details of which will be announced tomorrow.

Maiden manager Rod Smallwood explains: “We do not want our fans being ripped off either by counterfeit tickets or through costly mark-ups on so called secondary ticketing websites. These problems now affect the UK more than any other country outside of the US.

“We believe the most successful way to prevent this is by implementing paperless ticketing. This proved highly successful in reducing piracy at our previous London shows in 2013 and on our North American tours since 2010. This is a simple procedure and goes a long way to minimising the resale of tickets and reducing fraud by requiring the original cardholder purchaser to be present at entry.

“We have been working with our UK promoter Live Nation and Ticketmaster to ensure that we can operate a paperless ticketing system, in full or in part, at all the UK venues we’ll play in 2017. We are also instigating a number of additional measures which we believe will directly help our fans to access tickets in the fairest, safest way and at the intended price.”

According to Smallwood, those measures are:

  • Ensuring that every venue will operate paperless ticketing, either 100% or partially
  • Setting conditions of purchase specifying that tickets are not for resale
  • Ensuring to the best of our abilities, in conjunction with Live Nation and Ticketmaster, that secondary ticketing sites are prevented from listing our shows and to invalidate tickets should any appear on these secondary sites
  • Setting a maximum limit of four tickets per person per show
  • To use purchaser names on tickets where they are not paperless and to require the cardholder to be present at the show, with picture ID
  • A dedicated team to monitor ticket sales in real-time throughout the fan club presale, any other presales and the general public on-sale to ensure ticket limits are being imposed, and all suspicious activity reported and investigated
  • A dedicated customer support team on hand to deal with any issues from fans with legitimate problems
  • Being aware of criminals and their methods to infiltrate our best practices and having the conviction to retrospectively cancel their inventory. This is especially in respect of automated bots and multiple card efforts which are used to garner large numbers of tickets at the onsale to the detriment of the fans
  • Reinforcing the message that if you buy a ticket from an unauthorised source, it will be either invalid or counterfeit. Do not become a victim

Smallwood also highlights that Iron Maiden are signatories to the FanFair Alliance declaration, which “unites music businesses, artists and fans against ticket touting and profiteering in the online secondary market”.

 


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