The return of two highly popular dance artists has created new headaches for promoters dealing with increased public outcry over ticket scalping. Skrillex’s first show in nine years at the iconic Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Morrison, Colorado, and Pretty Lights’ comeback tour after a five-year absence have created supply and demand issues not often seen in the amphitheater and club space. That’s meant new challenges with how to deal with resellers buying tickets en masse and posting them online for profit.
Earlier this week, AEG Presents announced plans to reclaim tickets purchased by scalpers for a sold-out April 29 show by Skrillex at Red Rocks and resell them to fans through the Fair AXS ticketing platform, AEG’s own fan verification. Fair AXS requires fans to register in advance for high demand tickets, and like Ticketmaster’s Verified Fan platform, is designed to weed out scalpers.
The company is now weighing whether a similar plan to claw back tickets for the upcoming, sold-out Pretty Lights tour that kicks off Aug. 6 at the Mission Ballroom in Denver and sell those to fans through Fair AXS.
With the Skrillex concert, says AEG Presents co-president and senior talent buyer Don Strausberg, when the company scraped the sales data, it found instances of buyers who bought multiple tickets, exceeding the four-ticket limit on purchases and violated the terms of service for AEG-owned ticketing system AXS tickets. Those ticket purchases were then canceled, refunded to the originally buyer and put back on sale through the Fair AXS platform, a registration-based identity-verification system that helps concert promoters determine the likelihood that a ticket purchaser is a legitimate fan and not a ticket broker. (This verification system was recently utilized by Zach Bryan for his 2023 tour and requires fans to register in advance and provide their credit card information.) Strausberg says AEG is now considering whether to do the same for the Peaking Lights tour.
Strausberg didn’t identify how many Skrillex tickets were pulled back and sold through Fair AXS, but noted that demand for the April 29 show far exceeded supply at the world-famous 9,545-capacity venue.
“It’s time consuming,” to comb through all of the sales, and requires additional steps by both AEG and fans to register in advance for Fair AXS and to verify the accounts, Strausberg says, “but lately more people are asking for this.” Trying to identify individuals who violated AXS’s terms or service is “something we do without fail on nearly every large concert” says Strausberg, although the scale of unauthorized activity happening with the Skrillex show was larger than normal.
Scalping exists at every level of the concert business, but it’s much rarer to see high volume ticket scalping at smaller capacity venues like those on the Pretty Lights tour, where the artist is playing 3,500-size rooms. AXS ticketed 18 of the 24 shows on the Pretty Lights tour, totaling about 60,000 tickets total.
Lately, ticketing companies like Ticketmaster and AXS have become more effective at reducing the number of tickets that end up on the secondary market. That’s pushed some brokers into smaller capacity events, says a secondary market analyst who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “There’s much less opportunity at the club and theater level,” they add, where the majority of shows don’t sell completely sell out.