Eric Church Ups War Against Scalpers, Cancels 25,000 Tickets
Eric Church has dealt yet another blow to ticket scalpers, by canceling more than 25,000 tickets for his Holdin’ My Own Tour that were identified as having been purchased by scalpers. Church has placed the tickets in question back on the market for fans to purchase via venue ticketing services and his own web site.
Church’s management team uses a proprietary program to comb through ticket purchases to ensure each ticket was purchased by a concert-going fan, not a system of organized price-gougers. “We’re getting better at identifying who the scalpers are,” Church told the Associated Press. “Every artist can do this, but some of them don’t. Some of them don’t feel the way I feel or are as passionate.”
The “Kill a Word” singer, whose three-hour, two-set shows on the current trek will run through May, tells the AP that some segments of the secondary ticket market are steeped in fraud. “They buy thousands of tickets across the
Church has been fighting the scalper system, although not on this grand a scale, for several years already, telling Rolling Stone Country in 2014, “It drives me fucking crazy… The problem I have is that scalpers have a bazillion people working for them. And they have those bots that scan. So it’s not fair. I’ve been told to raise my prices. But there’s guys out there that want to come to a show and bring their family to a show and are working a blue-collar job, they were there for us in bars and clubs, so I should raise to $100 because that’s what the scalpers think? I refuse to believe that.”
The Holdin’ My Own Tour resumes Thursday, February 23rd, in