The Cure: Robert Smith warns against buying tickets in the secondary market

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Robert Smith and The Cure have begun their fight against the inevitable after announcing they would be fair and transparent about the pricing of their A Lost World tour tickets. Tickets for the band’s shows have surfaced on some secondary market vendor sites, ranging from $300 to $6,000. The news apparently reached the band as well, prompting Smith to tweet on Monday (March 13) that the offers were fraudulent. “Not one of these crooks has a real ticket for sale.”

The ticket secondary market

If you have a ticket for an event and cannot attend it, you are looking for ways to avert the potential financial loss. This is the simplest secondary market, in which all those who hold up their tickets last minute before the venues also participate. With the increasing digitization of sales, this practice became less necessary. At the same time, it has become far easier to buy tickets en masse, hold them, let tried and true market dynamics do the work, and then sell them for a profit. In the current The Cure case, the sale of tickets only begins on March 15 (tomorrow, from the perspective of the prices mentioned here). The offered cards do not yet exist. Nobody owns them. In addition, the band has taken measures in preparation for the tour to ensure that this exact situation does not occur and that nobody benefits excessively from it.

Only the actual buyers are authorized to enter, so the tickets are personalised. They can only be purchased through the Ticketmaster Verified Fan service, which is intended to reduce the potential for bot purchases. Tickets may only be resold at the price of their original purchase and through Ticketmaster itself.

For these reasons, too, Smith’s advice not to take up the offers that now exist is important. Except in some US states, which have banned some of the above measures by law, the chance that the providers will get tickets once the sale is open should be rather small.

The “A Lost World” tour will take place in North America between late May and early July.

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