True North wants to run the concert ticket reselling show

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This article was published 08/03/2017 (3465 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

True North Sports and Entertainment is hoping the provincial government changes the law to allow ticket scalping.

Or as Kevin Donnelly, True North’s senior vice-president of venues and entertainment, calls it, “We want to be in the business of facilitating legal resale ticket transactions.

“We want to provide this service for our patrons,” he said Wednesday. “Right now we tell them go to the alley… we want the law to change so we can tell our fans, if you want fair market value, we have the platform for you.”

Donnelly said it means True North would be able to point people with tickets they want to resell back to the Ticketmaster website and sell them for whatever people are willing to pay, whether it is higher or lower than face value. All of the tickets would be legitimate, something that’s not always the case when people buy what they believe are real tickets from resellers.

Donnelly said it could also help prevent what happened last year, when 90 per cent of the tickets sold for a Twenty One Pilots show at the Burton Cummings Theatre were bought by bots located outside of Manitoba. Besides the MTS Centre, True North runs “The Burt” and holds occasional summer concerts at Investors Group Field.

“Less than 70 people bought tickets in Manitoba,” Donnelly said. “Legitimizing it would increase that percentage.”

Concertgoers have always had to deal with scalpers, but the practice is illegal under the Amusement Act and people will be charged — if police catch them.

In recent years, with tickets being bought by people online, the problem has exploded thanks to scalpers able to buy numerous tickets with the help of computer programs or bots. There was a large public outcry when tickets for last year’s Tragically Hip concert tour sold out in minutes, with many fans left on the sideline without tickets.

The Ontario government is consulting with the public to get feedback on how to make ticket buying easier, but with enhanced legal enforcement.

In Manitoba’s Throne Speech in November, the Progressive Conservative government said it wanted to “take steps to increase protection for both investors and consumers by strengthening securities legislation and undertaking consultation on the topic of modernizing and enhancing consumer protections related to secondary ticket sales — so-called ticket scalping.”

Rochelle Squires, the province’s Minister of Sport, Culture and Heritage, said she has sent out letters to stakeholders, from True North to the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra to the Winnipeg Blue Bombers, to get their views on ticket scalping.

But Squires emphasized she’s not looking at venues and teams somehow being able to scalp tickets legally to their own events: “That is not what this is about,” she said.

“We know it’s heartbreaking when families show up at the MTS Centre or Investors Group Field, they’ve got tickets in their hand, they’ve paid for those tickets, and they want to go see the show and see the game, and they’re denied because unbeknownst to them, they bought the tickets on the secondary market and they weren’t valid tickets,” she said at the legislature Wednesday.

“We want to stand shoulder to shoulder with our primary and secondary ticket sellers to ensure that Manitoban consumers are being protected.”

Squires said Manitobans may be asking if there’s a way to let individuals make money on the resale of tickets they aren’t going to use “if the market values the ticket more than you paid.”

But she said under the Amusement Act, even a community group could be in violation of the law by buying event tickets and making money for a worthwhile purpose by offering them in a silent auction.

“We don’t want that being illegal,” Squires said.

Squires couldn’t say whether a new law will wind its way through in time to be able to be voted on by MLAs and come into force this session.

On Wednesday, both Donnelly and Patti-Anne Tarlton, Ticketmaster Canada’s chief operating officer, met with provincial bureaucrats to give their feedback on the issue of ticket scalping and bots.

Tarlton said Ticketmaster has tried several ways to prevent bots from buying tickets, including having people check off photos to say how many of them show grass, but the bots have figured out how to get around them.

She said with the upcoming Ed Sheeran concert tour, they are trying a system where fans will have to go through a pre-sale registration process through their Ticketmaster account and fill in boxes with the month and day of their birthday, their mobile phone number and which show they want to go to. Next week, a text message will be sent with a passcode a few hours before the pre-sale start time.

“Now we’re trying to not let (bots) buy them in the first place,” Tarlton said. “It’s an advanced vetting to confirm you are a human.”

kevin.rollason@freepress.mb.ca

nick.martin@freepress.mb.ca