The Barcelona festival, Primavera Sound, will be the first major music festival to exclusively use mobile-only tickets. The festival is ditching paper tickets and has partnered with the digital ticketing platform, Dice. Dice will also serve all of Primavera events beginning in 2020.
The Dice platform locks each ticket purchase directly to the purchasers’ phone, which hopefully will curtail ticket scalping. Ticket scalping has unfortunately grown more sophisticated in recent years thanks to the saturation of automated bot software that buys up all the seats the instant they go on sale.
Tickets purchased on Dice can’t be resold on other websites, however they can be transferred between phones but the other party must also have a Dice account. Dice allows for ticket refunds, and the ticket’s QR code is also hidden until two hours before the event. If a purchaser doesn’t have access to the Dice app, they can still get into the event by showing their ID at the venue.
Dice has for the most part been well received, however it did face criticism last year for hiding booking fees in ticket prices. The app sells tickets at a price that bundles fees without it being transparent to the user. Bundling makes Dice tickets seem more expensive than competing vendors, however Dice prices end up being the same or sometimes less once the competitors’ checkout fees are added.
Source: The Verge
