Something Corporate Brings Ticket Control Back To The Grassroots

Something Corporate has always been a bit of an enigma, beyond its purposely ironic name. After having some success on the record charts between 2000 and 2004, the band took an extended hiatus in 2005, regrouped, and performed sporadically until last fall.

In the meantime, frontman Andrew McMahon formed notable side projects in Jack’s Mannequin and Andrew McMahon in the Wilderness, building a sizable and loyal fanbase of his own. When Something Corporate reunited again in 2022, at an In The Wilderness show on McMahon’s 40th birthday, it stuck.

When they performed at October’s When We Were Young festival in Las Vegas, along with headlining House of Blues Las Vegas the night before, it triggered more than nostalgia for McMahon and Something Corporate.

“It felt good seeing fans connect with their memories and all of us onstage with big smiles on our faces,” McMahon says. “So we slowly rolled out some shows around New Year’s and now we are rehearsing for a tour.”

One of the harsh realities of returning to touring after only sporadically hitting the road over the last decade is the profound change in the ticketing ecosystem. And McMahon, acutely conscious of the fans, was determined they would not be victimized by scalpers and astronomical ticket prices.

McMahon met with his team, including WME agents Michael Coughlin and Brett Schaffer, and C3 Management’s Morgan Young and Ryan Carignan, to devise a ticketing plan that would, as much as possible, cut scalpers out of the equation.

What they’ve come up with is a white glove solution that works with existing ticketing platforms and promoters, fan clubs and social media to ensure tickets land in the hands of actual fans at face value.

With the exception of New York, Colorado and Utah markets where state laws prohibit them, Something Corporate enabled face value-only ticket exchanges and turned off “platinum” ticketing. Then, with promoters, they conducted “over the limit” sweeps to identify purchases that violate the terms of service — for instance, those using multiple or spoofed accounts to purchase tickets in numbers over the limit allowed — and canceled potentially fraudulent ticket purchases.

Those canceled tickets are placed on hold, and outreach begins. Through social media and fan clubs, the team learns if tickets were wrongly canceled, if canceled tickets were refunded; if fans were shut out of an onsale; or if they wanted tickets but were unable to purchase them. Fans fill out a Google form to let the team know their situation; the claims are vetted and legit fans are added to a list of those needing tickets. The list is sent to each promoter who, in turn, reaches out to the fans and sells the held tickets via protected ticket links or credit card authorization forms.

It sounds labor-intensive because it is, McMahon and his team acknowledge. But it’s also effective. And it’s worth it to McMahon to go that extra mile for the fans.

“I’ve been able to do what I do for as long as I have because I respect my fans,” McMahon emphasizes. “We have always tried to fairly price our tickets.”

When Something Corporate returned to the stage at House of Blues Las Vegas, “I was nervous that we would even sell it out,” McMahon says. “I had no idea we would sell it out within minutes. The whole market was reshaped by scalpers. Within moments, there were tickets for sale online for five times what we were charging at the box office for that first show.”

McMahon was determined to stop that.

After Vegas, Something Corporate sold out two nights at City National Grove in Anaheim, California, Dec. 30-31, moving 4,000 tickets at $68 each for a gross of $274,532.
Now, with their fan-first ticketing protocol in place, Something Corporate starts a new, 19-city “Out Of Office” tour June 20 at Brooklyn Steel in New York that winds through Oct. 12 at the Warfield in San Francisco.

“With Andrew, we have a partner who already has a direct line to his fans, so we could communicate with them,” C3’s Young says. “But it starts from inception and it has to be clear you’re going to do the work ahead of time and really stick to it. Not every promoter is going to have the same policies.”

Carignan knows the plan won’t stop all scalping, but it does assure fans that their needs are paramount. It also underscores their concern that secondary ticketers are focusing legislative efforts on individual states to hobble face-value-only ticket exchanges. He adds, “We tried to create multiple doorways that we could go through to reach the real fans. With all those different measures, like setting up face-value ticket exchange and doing the sweeps, holding those tickets and doing the fan outreach to collect and then sift through that data, it was making sure that all the fans out there who needed a ticket and wanted one got it.”

Fortunately, many of the primary ticketing platforms, including Ticketmaster and AXS, have the ability to check for patterns and anomalies in ticket purchases to quickly identify suspect purchases.

“We have contacts at each ticketing platform, and they have teams that go through and run these sweeps, run the analysis,” Schaffer explains. “Usually they’re looking at IP addresses; if the same IP address is using false information to get around that four-ticket limit, that’s the kind of common things that they look for.”

Despite the extra work, McMahon and his team are clearly pleased with the outcome of their anti-scalper efforts. They are quick to note that fans don’t get ripped off either by price gouging or counterfeiters, money from ticket sales remains under the team’s control, and scalpers aren’t making money for nothing.

“I’m glad to have a team that was willing to take up the mantle and fight on behalf of the fans against the scalpers,” McMahon says. “I don’t want people showing up to a show having spent $500 to see the gig. You can come whether or not you’re wealthy, or you want to sacrifice your mortgage, and that is really important to myself and to the band.”