MUSIC & NIGHTLIFE

Eric Church yanks 600 resale tickets for Indy show

Country star squares off against secondary-market vendors

David Lindquist
david.lindquist@indystar.com
Eric Church will perform Thursday at Bankers Life Fieldhouse.

It's legal in Indiana to resell concert tickets for more than face value, but that doesn't mean Eric Church endorses the practice.

The country star is making a splash by canceling tickets he believes are being resold on secondary-market websites. Church invalidated 25,000 tickets for upcoming dates on his "Holdin' My Own" tour, and that number doesn't include 600 tickets he yanked for Thursday's show at Bankers Life Fieldhouse.

Fielding Logan, one of Church's managers at Q Prime South, said the "Drink in My Hand" singer is trying to prevent companies from taking advantage of fans.

Church has been an outspoken opponent of secondary-market vendors who buy tickets in bulk since he became a headlining attraction at large venues in 2012. To identify suspect transactions, his representatives look for patterns that match the buying habits of ticket brokers.

"After three tours and over 200 arena shows, we've identified approximately 10 criteria that let us know if someone is a scalper," Logan said in an email interview. "These tells, in combination with our gut instincts, have proven to be a pretty good system for rooting out bad actors."

For the Indianapolis concert, 600 tickets were returned to Ticketmaster.com on Jan. 26 to be sold at face value. The NBA arena's typical capacity for a concert is 18,000.

Logan said the per-show average for Church's invalidated tickets is 500. "We canceled as many as 1,200 on a single show and as few as 100," Logan said.

In a 2016 report, investigators in New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman's office cited a single broker that bought more than 1,000 tickets within one minute to a U2 concert at Madison Square Garden when tickets went on sale on Dec. 8, 2014, despite the original seller's claim of a four-ticket limit.

The Schneiderman report said resale tickets on sites such as StubHub and TicketsNow average margins of 49 percent above face value and sometimes more than 10 times the price.

Church told The Associated Press he is committed to keeping tabs on who buys his tickets.

"Our fans know that as long as we tour, we're going to do everything we can to make sure they pay face value for the ticket," he said.

Logan said the "Holdin' My Own" tour has reinstated about 1 percent of orders to fans who were mistakenly identified as secondary-market vendors.

As for the other 99 percent of buyers, Logan said refunds were automatically applied to credit cards.

"Ticket scalpers got their money back, and we would expect that scalpers would in turn refund their customers," he said. "But with ticket scalpers, you never know. Fans would have a strong case for contesting charges with their credit card company if they paid for something that the scalper didn’t deliver."

Eric Church fans, are you ready for the endurance test?

The Associated Press contributed to this story.

Call IndyStar reporter David Lindquist at (317) 444-6404. Follow him on Twitter: @317Lindquist.