At Tanglewood last summer, a concertgoer paid over $1,000 for tickets to a student performance that were distributed free on the festival’s own website.
At the Annapolis Symphony, a woman spent $1,335 for four tickets for a holiday pops concert that would have cost $248 had she purchased them on the orchestra’s own website.
And in Ann Arbor, MI, supposedly prime seats at the Philadelphia Orchestra’s April concerts were recently being hawked for $500—five times their official value and without a guaranteed seat location upon purchase.
A growing number of misleading practices and outright scams are disrupting orchestras’ ticketing operations across the country, as online scalpers and bots sell tickets at grossly inflated prices. Some sell photocopied tickets to multiple buyers; others offer tickets that aren’t actually in their possession. As bad actors move in, orchestra marketers say they are increasingly concerned about customer relationships, such as the ability to combine emailed tickets with donation requests, parking information, and surveys. Alert to fraying audience trust, some administrators place their hopes in legal remedies and new ticketing technology.
“The ticket reselling business is the bane of my existence,” says Amy Aldrich, director of patron experience at the Boston Symphony Orchestra. “There are so many deceptive, deceitful, shyster-y, shady practices out there.” Aldrich points to websites like Lenoxmusiccenter.com that masquerade as official Tanglewood or BSO vendors, with text and images pulled from the orchestra’s own websites. Some resellers merely post speculative listings. “They don’t even have tickets yet, but they say they do,” she notes. “They don’t give specific seat locations, just general areas. We’ve seen thousand percent markups and hundreds of dollars of fees on top of that.”
“The ticket reselling business is the bane of my existence,” says Amy Aldrich, director of patron experience at the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
When resellers fail to offload their tickets, they may falsely tell credit card companies that there was a problem with their order and get the charges reversed. Stolen credit cards are sometimes used in these transactions, which prompt so-called chargebacks.
“The chargeback issue is really a product of straight-up fraud,” says Heather Noonan, vice president for advocacy at the League of American Orchestras. “These are stolen credit card numbers being used to purchase tickets, and when the actual owner of the credit card reaches out to the bank to say, ‘I didn’t buy this ticket,’ the orchestra is responsible for refunding the money.”
“When fans aim to support their local nonprofit symphony orchestra, the assumption is the money they spend on their ticket is going to support that organization and those musicians,” says Heather Noonan, vice president for advocacy at the League of American Orchestras.
Fake Websites, Paid Search Results
One of the more brazen scams involves the creation of official-seeming websites, whose unscrupulous owners pay for prominent rankings in paid Google search results. The University Musical Society at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor has warned patrons about TheHillAuditorium.com, which appears above UMS.org in a typical search. When would-be customers try to buy a ticket on the makeshift site, they are routed to TicketSqueeze.com, a resale marketplace. Main floor seats listed on Ticket Squeeze for the Philadelphia Orchestra on April 20 were recently selling for $329 to $495, in a section that UMS.org prices at $87 to $108.
At presentations by the University Musical Society at the University of Michigan, some audience members prefer printed tickets. Photo by Peter Smith Photography.
Ticket scanners are familiar at concerts nationwide, including at the University Musical Society in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Photo by Christian Najjar.
A spokesman for Ticket Squeeze said that TheHillAuditorium.com is an unaffiliated site, and that Ticket Squeeze is simply a listings platform, similar to eBay or Etsy, with no control over what sellers charge. “The prices are what the seller has chosen to sell them for,” the spokesman wrote in an email. “There’s many elements sellers consider when setting the price.”
The spokesman did not address questions about who the sellers are; a disclaimer on the site’s ticket checkout page portrays the markup as a kind of finder’s fee: “This listing describes tickets that the seller does not own or may not know the exact location of the seats, but is offering to obtain for you.”
Misleading practices and outright scams are disrupting orchestras’ ticketing operations across the country.
The University Musical Society staff has asked Google to clearly designate which sites are authorized sellers, and has warned its guest artists not to link to resellers. “We’re working to educate our audience, but for new people who haven’t purchased tickets from us before, that’s a much harder lift,” says Sara Billmann, the vice president of marketing and communications at the University Musical Society. “These fake sites are always going to be able to outspend us on SEO and just drive the pricing up.”
Sara Billmann, vice president of marketing and communications of the University Musical Society at the University of Michigan, says that the organization has to deal with fake websites that mimic the official UMS site but gouge ticket buyers, eroding trust.
The global secondary market is valued at more than $2.6 billion and rapidly growing, according to Straits Research. “When fans aim to support their local nonprofit symphony orchestra, the assumption is the money they spend on their ticket is going to support that organization and those musicians,” Noonan says. “This not only impacts consumer confidence but really impacts the business model for orchestras.”
The League is scrutinizing the resale industry on multiple fronts. It is part of Fix the Tix, a coalition of talent and industry groups that advocate for a national ticket reform bill. (A bipartisan group of lawmakers in the Senate introduced the “Fans First Act” last December but the législation has yet to advance to a vote.) The League is also lobbying the Federal Trade Commission to consider nonprofit performing arts presenters’ specific struggles as it develops new rules on junk fees.
Meanwhile, several state bills are in the works, with Maryland having passed a ticket reform bill on April 8 that aggressively targets resale companies. This bill bans speculative tickets, eliminates surprise fees, and requires all-inclusive ticket pricing from sellers, though it failed to enact a 10% cap on fees.
The League of American Orchestras is scrutinizing the ticket resale industry and working with a coalition of industry groups to advocate for a national ticket reform bill.
Sarah Johansen, the director of business operations at the Annapolis Symphony Orchestra testified at the Maryland State House in February about the orchestra’s own difficulties. She began seeing predatory practices last year when patrons turned up at the box office with questions about their tickets. “I was saying, ‘This is weird. It looks like you have our tickets but that is not our email,’ ” Johansen recalls, adding that she had no record of the sale. “I began giving out comps because I did not want to see people who supported us—by buying what they thought were tickets from our website—turned away at the door. “As a nonprofit organization, we want [to provide] access to the arts and we set our prices very specifically for that reason.”
Sarah Johansen, director of business operations at the Annapolis Symphony Orchestra, noticed predatory practices when patrons turned up at the box office with questions about their tickets. “I began giving out comps because I did not want to see people who supported us—by buying what they thought were tickets from our website—turned away at the door,” she says.
New Weapons Against Fraud
Several orchestras have turned to a delivery service called True Tickets. Its technology allows venues to sell digital tickets with QR codes that automatically refresh every 30 seconds, so that a reseller’s screenshots or printouts will not be valid by showtime. Ticket delivery can also be strategically delayed or limited.
Co-founder Matt Zarracina describes True Tickets as a “rules engine” that allows venues to place guardrails on activity around any ticket. “A ticket is a license to do something and there can be different rights associated with that ticket,” he said. “So the orchestra might say that student tickets can’t be shared. They want to make sure you come as a student—whereas a subscriber may have all sorts of rights that they’ve essentially purchased.”
The San Diego Symphony introduced True Tickets for events at the Rady Shell at Jacobs Park last summer. “It provides our ticket office with the ability to see the entire history of that ticket: who purchased it, how it was forwarded to this person and then that person,” says Craig Hall, the symphony’s vice president for marketing and communications. “We can prescribe the number of times it can be shared. I can share it one time with my wife, but I can’t share it four additional times.”
Craig Hall, vice president for marketing and communications at the San Diego Symphony, which uses a variety of digital platforms to prevent fraud and maintain ticket security.
Some high-profile artists add their own restrictions on the number of tickets allotted per customer or the allowed window for sharing (whether five days or a few hours). For certain rental events at its venues, the San Diego Symphony uses Ticketmaster, which has its own “SafeTix” technology, an encrypted barcode that automatically refreshes every few seconds. Both True Tickets and Ticketmaster have the ability to gather customer data on both the original ticket owner and the actual attendee, though only True Tickets is integrated with the customer relations software Tessitura.
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The homescreen of the San Diego Symphony’s mobile app. -
One of the San Diego Symphony’s mobile tickets.
Stricter and more comprehensive laws may ultimately be orchestras’ best hope of getting ticket fraud under control, but in the meantime, the Boston Symphony’s Aldrich says that True Tickets has helped clamp down on fraud, even if it is one tool among many. “There’s a segment of our audience that is older, not as tech-savvy, and prefers printed tickets,” she notes. “That’s where they go online and the [reseller] will say, ‘Oh, yeah, we’re going to FedEx these to you,’ and then they never do.” To avoid this, the physical box office remains an alternative.
“It starts with consumer education,” Aldrich continues. “When we’re putting out social posts about shows, we always say, ‘Tanglewood is the only official seller of Tanglewood tickets.’ We repeat that information so people become accustomed to it.”
The League of American Orchestras’ At a Glance: Ticketing Policies site provides a wealth of information and updates about ticket policies and legislation. Alongside policy action at the state level, the Federal Trade Commission and U.S. Congress are turning attention to proposals that would set new national rules for those that sell concert tickets on both the primary and secondary sales markets. The League, in partnership with the Performing Arts Alliance, is a member of the Fix the Tix Coalition, and is analyzing all active proposals for the impact on orchestras. The League is supporting immediate action to stop predatory activity in the secondary market that is hurting audiences and creating substantial financial and reputational harm to orchestras. Visit americanorchestras.org/at-a-glance-ticketing-policies/ to learn more.
