Ticketmaster executive VP David Marcus was interviewed by The Rob on Pearl Jam Radio on Monday, and he discussed Pearl Jam teaming up with Ticketmaster for their summer 2018 North American stadium tour dates to use the Verified Fan program to stop scalpers from using robots to scoop up concert tickets. Marcus discussed a system Taylor Swift recently used, and how hopefully artists like Pearl Jam who partner with Ticketmaster can use it in the future. Alternative Nation transcribed Marcus’ comments.
“I’ll just connect this all back to this Verified Fan thing, because we just finished this really remarkable experience with Taylor Swift. Totally not for this audience potentially, but we had the most intense, most incredible Verified Fan thing. We were able to take all of the Verified Fans and let them in one at a time into a map where they could pick their seats.
High demand, the very first moment that we let people in, we were able to let them in at 3 per minute to come into a map and choose from a totally interactive seat map. So X number, even though it was there, was irrelevant, because we let you choose. What we saw with that was people went crazy, they got exactly the seats they wanted, not the best available X number, but no, I want to sit on the left side because I know my friends are sitting there, or I want to be in the 200 section at the rail.
We saw conversation rates, we measure eCommerce based on what percent of people who hit the map actually buy something. Typically at Amazon it’s 1 or 2 percent, in a Ticketmaster situation high demand on sale it’s in the teens. In this Taylor Swift thing, it was 85%. So X numbers are this thing that help the software system sell real fast, but we would really like to give fans the opportunity to pick their seats. We won’t have that opportunity here with this one, but that task was so successful that we’re really looking at how do we make that the experience going forward.”
