'Hamilton' and 'Harry Potter' Productions Try to Outwit Scalpers

‘Hamilton’ and ‘Harry Potter’ Productions Try to Outwit Scalpers By MICHAEL PAULSON and BEN SISARIOFEB. 12, 2017 The Harry Potter play in London has been trying to combat scalpers. The play is planning to open on Broadway next year, and hoping to contain scalping there as well. CreditTom Jamieson for The New York Times LONDON — “Hamilton” and the new “Harry Potter” play are the hottest theatrical shows of the moment, with “Hamilton” outgrossing everything else on Broadway, and Harry, Hermione and Ron drawing hordes of muggles to London’s West End. But success has a side effect: Both shows have fallen prey to high-tech scalpers who harvest large quantities of seats and resell them at exorbitant markups. “Hamilton” has been hit particularly hard: When it first opened on Broadway, nearly 80 percent of seats were purchased by automated ticket bots, and for Lin-Manuel Miranda’s final performance, resellers were seeking an average of $10,900 a seat. Now, as “Hamilton” prepares to open in London this fall and “Harry Potter” plans to open on Broadway next year, the producers of both shows are aggressively trying to contain scalping, a long-festering problem for the entertainment industry that has been exacerbated by technology. The producers of “Hamilton” are trying an unusual approach for theater — paperless ticketing — while the producers of “Harry Potter” are refusing to accept resold tickets. And in the United States and Britain, policy makers are tackling the issue anew, concerned about the effect of industrialized scalping on consumers and artists. “I’ve been in the business 50 years, and I’ve lived through lots of scalping,” said Cameron Mackintosh, producer of “Cats,” “Les Misérables,” “The Phantom of the Opera” and “Miss Saigon.” “It’s just got far, far more sophisticated, because of automation’s creeping stranglehold on human beings.” Photo “Hamilton,” which has been immensely popular on Broadway, is to open this fall in London, where producers are working to deter scalpers. CreditChristian Hansen for The New York Times Mr. Mackintosh is on the front lines of the latest battle against resellers. In addition to being a producer, he is an owner of major theaters in the West End, including Victoria Palace, where “Hamilton” will begin performances in November. For the tickets that just went on sale — and the first block immediately sold out — the show is trying paperless ticketing, which has long been used for concerts, to the consternation of ticket brokers. Picture this: Instead of receiving a traditional ticket from the box office or a facsimile printed at home, you just get an email confirming your purchase. Then, on the day of the show, you have to bring the same credit card you used for the purchase — as well as the email confirmation and a photo ID — and run the credit card through a scanner to get in. The theory is that requiring the same credit card for purchase and entrance should complicate efforts by would-be resellers. “Going to the theater is expensive enough as it is with the money that you need to charge to put these big shows on, so it’s absolutely ridiculous for it to be inflated by third parties,” Mr. Mackintosh said. There are downsides: It makes it harder to purchase tickets as gifts, and there is a risk of congestion or confusion at the theater doors. And the method is not fail-safe. On the day “Hamilton” tickets went on sale in London, with a face value of up to $200, tickets were already being promoted for resale at up to $6,000. Their validity was unknown — the show has vowed to cancel resold tickets — but in theory, a reseller could try to circumvent the system by accompanying customers to the show. For now, paperless ticketing does not appear to be an option in New York, which restricts such sales. There, “Hamilton” has tried a different approach: reducing the effect of resellers by canceling suspect purchases, and, more recently, by raising prices at the box office to more closely reflect the tickets’ perceived market value. “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” a critically acclaimed sequel to J. K. Rowling’s books, is trying a similar, labor-intensive approach in London. The producers have hired a group of workers who are combing through sales records and broker sites, looking for evidence of unauthorized bulk buying — often via bots, which are computer programs used by scalpers — as well as for tickets offered on resale websites. The show’s producers say they have stopped about 2,500 online sales and have refused to accept tickets from about 150 patrons at the door — a tiny fraction of tickets sold to date. Photo Tickets for “Hamilton” on Broadway have been offered by resellers for thousands of dollars.CreditChristian Hansen for The New York Times “We have no silver bullet, but we are trying to do everything we can within the law, and it has made a massive difference,” said Sonia Friedman, a lead producer of the “Harry Potter” play. Ms. Friedman and her co-producer, Colin Callender, said they would be consulting with New York producers and officials about what steps they might take to limit resales when their show opens next year on Broadway, where it is also expected to be a blockbuster. The secondary ticketing market is a big business that has long been a significant factor for major concerts and sports events. Live Nation Entertainment, the company that owns Ticketmaster, has estimated it at $8 billion a year. And the business is increasingly global, making any one country’s laws difficult to enforce. StubHub, a large ticket reselling company, said it supported legislation to combat “bot misuse” but also argued that producers shared blame for high ticket prices. “There continues to be a lack of transparency in the primary market about how many tickets are available for public sale,” the company said. “This is despite the fact that the industry and regulators continue to put pressure on the secondary industry, rather than attempting to tackle these problems at the source.” Theater producers said they objected to reselling on two grounds: It limits access, by making it harder for people who are not wealthy to afford popular shows, and it deprives theater artists, presenters and investors of profits that should be theirs but instead go to ticket brokers. Photo For “Hamilton,” which will open at Victoria Palace in London, paperless ticketing will be tried.CreditTom Jamieson for The New York Times At a recent performance of “Harry Potter” in London, ticket holders expressed considerable wariness about resellers. “I was looking in at all the touting sites, all the reselling sites, and the same type of ticket I got was going for like 600 pounds a ticket — it was ridiculous,” said Lauren Putland, 26, of Portsmouth, England. But Ms. Putland acknowledged that she had once used a reseller to obtain tickets to a Britney Spears concert. “I was literally obsessed with her — I would have done anything to go to her Circus tour — so I paid over the odds for that,” she said. The issue affects other shows beyond “Hamilton” and “Harry Potter,” for which demand seriously outstrips supply. New York Theater Workshop, an Off Broadway nonprofit that has just 200 seats and is perhaps best known as the birthplace of “Rent,” has emerged as a test case because it has recently had two shows with strong crossover appeal: “Lazarus,” featuring songs by David Bowie, who died while the production was running, and “Othello,” starring Daniel Craig and David Oyelowo. The theater tried to limit reselling by requiring ticket buyers to present the same credit card used for the purchase at the box office and, mimicking steps taken by “Hamilton,” imposing limits on the number of tickets a buyer could purchase. “The lesson we learned is that it is possible to limit it and to frustrate their attempts, but not to completely eliminate it,” said Jeremy Blocker, the theater’s managing director. “With ‘Othello,’ we know we saw instances of a ticket or two popping up online at a pretty significant markup.” In the United States and Britain, lawmakers are scrambling to try to keep up with a fast-changing landscape. Why ‘Hamilton’ Has Heat What’s the story behind a show that’s become a Broadway must-see with no marquee names, no special effects and almost no white actors? Erik Piepenburg explains, in six snapshots, why “Hamilton” has become such a big deal. In December, President Barack Obama signed an antibot bill, and in November, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York, where bots were already banned, signed a law increasing penalties for their use. Eric T. Schneiderman, the New York attorney general, has come to believe that the state should consider changing its restriction on paperless tickets. “We’re the only state that has this broad a prohibition,” he said in an interview. New York’s tougher antibot laws were a form of progress, he added; the arrival of “Harry Potter” next year will be “a test of our new criminalization of the bots; we’ll see what the impact is.” In Britain, where pop musicians have been far more vocal about scalping concerns, an advocacy group, the FanFair Alliance, was founded last year by a group of artists and powerful managers (Mumford & Sons, Ed Sheeran and more). Adele has become a high-visibility example of how artists are trying to control scalping. Using Songkick, a boutique ticketing company, she has sold hundreds of thousands of seats directly to fans, which Songkick says has drastically reduced their availability on the secondary market.

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