Bieber Fever

Here at the Show-Me Daily blog, we typically write about Missouri state and local policy issues. But this weekend, something way more exciting happened. JUSTIN BIEBER PERFORMED IN SAINT LOUIS! The Bieber fever was so overwhelming that colleague Josh Smith and I went down to the Scotttrade Center on Saturday to check out the concert.

OK, so we did not actually go into the concert. And this post is not really about teen heartthrob Justin Bieber. But we did have conversations with some friendly folks about their tickets for the concert. We will release a video of these interviews in the upcoming weeks. Did you know that Ticketmaster, venues, and sports teams want to use a new paperless ticketing technology that limits what we can do with our event tickets?

These paperless tickets may sound convenient and good for the environment (waste fewer trees), but they restrict our choices of how we can buy, share, or resell tickets. Most people feel that when they buy an event ticket, they own it and can do what they want with it. And rightfully so. If you buy a Justin Bieber CD and decide you do not want it anymore, do you have to return it to the store? Of course not.

We should not be forced to return our event tickets to Ticketmaster if we get sick, have a conflict, or simply want to give them to a friend. Ticketmaster claims they would be protecting us from the free market. But a recent investigation revealed that only 7 percent of tickets to a Justin Bieber concert in Nashville were directly available to fans. It does not look like Ticketmaster has the typical event-goer’s welfare in mind.