Anyone who's gone to a concert in the past few years knows how annoying ticket scalpers are.
All you want to do is a buy a few tickets to see your favorite musician live, but before you get a chance somebody with a computer program has scooped up all the good seats to sell for a profit.
These tickets get put on websites like StubHub and sold for huge markups, but Eric Church has taken big steps to prevent this on his upcoming tour.
Church has cancelled 25,000 tickets that were already sold for his upcoming tour. His team monitors sales to track scalpers, and he says they've identified that these tickets were bought automatically to be re-sold.
"They buy thousands of tickets across the U.S., not just mine, and they end up making a fortune," he said in an interview with the Associated Press. "They use fake credit cards, fake IDs. All of this is fraud."
Church has been fighting scalpers for years, and he's come up with lots of clever ways to make things hard for them.
The "Mr. Misunderstood" singer has tried paperless tickets (which are linked to the owner's credit card), giving priority to his fan club members, or just raising the price of his tickets.
To make up for the hassle he puts his fans through, Church plays extra long sets with no opening act. He also tries to keep the best tickets at his shows below $500.
"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," he said.
