Eric Church cancels scalpers’ tickets


Associated Press

NASHVILLE, Tenn.

Country star Eric Church has been battling ticket scalpers for years as his popularity grew and he began selling out arenas. But he’s taken his biggest step yet by cancelling more than 25,000 tickets to his spring tour that were purchased by scalpers and putting them back on sale for fans to purchase.

The “Springsteen” singer told The Associated Press he’s going to do everything he can do to stop what he calls a criminal organization that’s making millions.

“They buy thousands of tickets across the U.S., not just mine, and they end up making a fortune,” Church said. “They use fake credit cards, fake IDs. All of this is fraud.”

The tickets will be released today at noon local time for the remaining stops of the 60-city tour, which includes Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland on Friday, and PPG Paints Arena in Pittsburgh on April 21.

Church has used this same method to cancel tickets purchased by scalpers for a few individual shows previously, but never on this scale and few artists are as meticulous as Church is when it comes to verifying who is purchasing tickets for his shows.

“We’re getting better at identifying who the scalpers are,” Church said. “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.”

In a report last year, investigators in New York cited a single broker that bought 1,012 tickets within one minute to a U2 concert at Madison Square Garden when they went on sale on Dec. 8, 2014, despite the vendor’s claim of a four-ticket limit. By day’s end, that broker and one other had 15,000 tickets to U2’s North American shows.

The report said third-party brokers resell tickets on sites like StubHub at average margins of 49 percent above face value.