Why Chappell Roan's Strategy for Fighting Ticket Scalpers Matters — Even If It's Not a Perfect System

Scalpers hoping to score a big payout flipping Chappell Roan tickets likely just saw their profits disappear after the singer announced she was shutting down resellers who are charging exorbitant markups for her Oct. 1 show in Franklin, Tenn.

The news was greeted with praise from fans who watched the “Good Luck, Babe!” the singer's star rose to new heights this summer — as well as questions from ticket buyers wondering how the singer was able to call a mulligan on tickets she'd already sold to ensure real fans would attend her show.

The answer is not entirely clear – Roan's representatives did not respond Bulletin boardrequests for comment — but there's already enough information available about Franklin's show to tell part of the story. It's also worth noting that Roan isn't the first artist to deal with scalpers trying to inflate fan-friendly $30 turf tickets up to $900. In previous years, major artists like Ed Sheeran and Eric Church, among others, used the same strategy. And while it's not a perfect system, it's still an effective way to ensure more fans have access to affordable tickets.

In many ways, for a pioneering artist like Roan, there are worse problems. In the last year, thanks to the success of her album 2023 The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princessher work as a support act on Olivia Rodrigo's Guts World tour and her appearances this summer at Lollapalooza and Coachella, Roan, as some say in music business parlance, is the blowing the f— up. Now, as with any big star, scalpers are taking advantage.

In a less extensive example of this, tickets for Roan's Oct. 2 show at the Walmart Amphitheater near Rogers, Ark., were originally priced between $30 and $80 when they went on sale in June. Now, they sell for $300 to $1,200 on StubHub and other secondary sites — though in this case, only a few dozen tickets, out of a total capacity of 11,000, appear to be listed on StubHub.

But in Franklin, there were dozens, maybe hundreds, more resale tickets for sale for the show at the 7,500-capacity FirstBank Amphitheater. Located just 20 miles south of Nashville, Franklin is a much bigger music market than Rogers, and the inflated ticket prices apparently prompted someone on her team to work with Ticketmaster agents to find out who's making those tickets and remove them from them. responsible.

Catching scalpers on Ticketmaster, especially after the sale, is not particularly complicated. While there are laws governing ticket ownership and rights, in most cases ticket companies treat tickets as revocable licenses, meaning they have the right to disable tickets purchased by a fan and give them a refund , if they are caught violating Ticketmaster's terms of service.

For example, many scalpers will try to buy as many tickets as possible using multiple credit cards. This is a violation of Ticketmaster's “limit per order” policy, which limits the number of tickets that can be purchased per order based on the event and ticket demand.

Ticketmaster prohibits users from using multiple IP addresses or email addresses when purchasing tickets, so if someone successfully completed a Chappell Roan ticket purchase but was later found to have used multiple email addresses or a VPN to hide their IP addresses, this could is reason to cancel and refund their tickets. It wouldn't take long for a few Ticketmaster executives to investigate transactions for a 15,000-capacity show and find purchases linked to bots without IP addresses or large purchases from new accounts linked to free email services.

Once these transactions are detected, most are investigated and purchases are cancelled. In Roan's case, the canceled tickets were pooled and sold through a lottery to fans who had to register in advance to be able to buy them. While it is unclear how many tickets were canceled and reissued to fans, it is unlikely to have been more than a few hundred tickets.

While this practice is popular with fans and penalizes amateur scalpers, it is argued that in some cases it enriches professional scalpers who are better at avoiding detection by reducing the number of tickets available on resale sites and in turn increase. the price for those tickets that are not cancelled.

But the effort isn't specifically aimed at eliminating all ticket cuts. Instead, it's about casually disrupting the predatory practices of scalpers who target vulnerable shows by up-and-coming artists like Roan who don't want to charge their fans hundreds of dollars to see their concerts. And by focusing on high-margin shows where scalpers are ready to make big payouts, artists like Roan can really make a dent in professional ticket resellers and help keep more tickets affordable for fans.