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When tickets for Billie Eilish’s Hit Me Hard and Soft tour went on sale last week, buyers were shown a note from Ticketmaster that read “the artist wants to give fans, not scalpers, the best chance to buy tickets at face value,” and warned fans that they would only be able to transfer tickets at face value on a Ticketmaster platform called the Face Value Exchange. “Eilish has also chosen to make tickets for this tour mobile only and restricted from transfer,” the message reads, meaning PDF and “hard” tickets are not available, and that the tickets will be issued via the Ticketmaster app.
Eilish was lauded for this move, which seems like it would make it essentially impossible for scalpers to sell her tickets. But, as I’ve noted before, scalpers have solved almost every restriction that Ticketmaster has implemented. If you check third-party ticketing sites, you will see that despite Eilish’s restrictions, there are many scalpers selling tickets on the secondary market.
A ticket broker source told me “brokers have figured it out. Don’t think any anti-scalping measures could really stop them they will always find a way.” The method that will be used with Eilish is called “transferless links” or “wallet links,” the source said. A separate broker I talked to explained how this method works, and said they have used it in the past to defeat various Ticketmaster anti-scalping restrictions.
Over the years, the actual mechanisms for transferring tickets from a ticket broker to a customer have changed. For years, Ticketmaster mailed you “hard tickets,” which scalpers then sold in person or mailed to customers. Then came TicketFast, which were PDF tickets. PDF tickets were regularly faked, and so tickets now sometimes have time-based QR codes or barcodes that are constantly changing. Normally, these tickets can be uploaded into the backends of system like StubHub or other ticket broker sites, and can be transferred to a customer relatively easily. But it’s impossible to do this in the “normal” way when an artist like Eilish makes the tickets supposedly “untransferable.”