Eric Church Cancels 25,000 Tickets Bought By Scalpers For His Tour

Country music singer Eric Church has canceled more than 25,000 tickets for his upcoming Holdin’ My Own Tour, after it was identified as having been purchased by scalpers. Church has placed the tickets in question back on the market for fans to purchase, through ticket-venue services and his own website.

Church claimed his management team uses a proprietary program to filter the ticket purchases to ensure each ticket was purchased by a concert-going fan, and not a system of ticket-resellers.

“We’re getting better at identifying who the scalpers are,” Church said. “Every artist can do this, but some of them don’t. Some of them don’t feel the way I feel or are as passionate.”

The “Kill a Word” singer believes that fraud runs rampant in multiple sections of the secondary ticket market. “They buy thousands of tickets across the U.S., not just mine, and they end up making a fortune. They use fake credit cards, fake IDs. All of this is fraud.”

In a report last year, investigators in New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman‘s office cited a single broker who bought 1,012 tickets in one minute to a U2 concert. By day’s end, that broker had 15,000 tickets to the concert, which they then resold on sites like Stub Hub and TicketsNow. The report stated that such tickets are sold at average margins of 49 cents above face value, and sometimes more than 10 times the price.

Church has long been fighting the scalper system, though never on this grand a scale. In an interview in 2014 with Rolling Stone Country, he said, “It drives me fucking crazy… The problem I have is that scalpers have a bazillion people working for them. And they have those bots that scan. So it’s not fair. I’ve been told to raise my prices. But there’s guys out there that want to come to a show and bring their family to a show and are working a blue-collar job, they were there for us in bars and clubs, so I should raise to $100 because that’s what the scalpers think? I refuse to believe that.”

Over the years, the country-music star has tried multiple methods to stymie the scalping phenomenon. He’s used paperless ticketing, increasing the ticket price to make them less appealing to resellers, and increasing the screening of purchases through his fan club.

Despite the scalper tickets being revoked, the tour itself is alive and well. The Holdin’ My Own Tour will resume Thursday, February 23rd, in Indianapolis, Ind., with a show in Cleveland the following night. After a Canadian trek, the tour will return to the U.S. on March 16, with a show in Portland, Oregon. The tour will then wrap up with two shows at Nashville’s Bridgestone Arena on May 26 and 27.