Angry that tickets are being resold to a John Mellencamp interview and performance at its facility tonight, August 17, the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles is warning fans that if they do not pick up their tickets in person they will not receive a refund.
In fact, in an email to Ticketmaster.com customers yesterday, August 16, the museum said it was cutting off refunds at noon PDT the same day as a result of the ticket resale because of people “who feel our event is put on for their financial benefit.”
Ticket resale is legal in California, but venues have buffer zones around them where tickets cannot be resold. Permits are also required for ticket resellers, according to TicketNews’ compendium of state ticket resale laws.
The event is sponsored by American Express, which is the only form of payment that was accepted for the tickets, and proceeds from the sold-out show will benefit the museum. To pick up the tickets at the box office, the purchaser must show an ID and the American Express card used to buy the tickets.
Museum box office officials listed several entities as culprits in reselling the tickets, including Razorgator and TicketsNow, which is a subsidiary of Ticketmaster, the official ticket seller for the museum.
“We are working on making it even tougher for these entities to secure inventory for our future special events and fundraisers,” the museum wrote in the email, which was first posted by LAObserved.com.
The museum is threatening to enlist undercover officers from the Los Angeles Police Department to patrol the grounds of the venue to ensure no resale transactions occur on their property. Capacity at the venue is 220.
Both Razorgator and TicketsNow are ticket exchanges, where ticket buyers and sellers connect to resell tickets, and in a lot of cases those exchanges do not own the inventory being sold.
The email states:
Dear Ticketmaster.com ticket purchasers,
The GRAMMY Museum would like to inform you, our Box Office WILL NOT be doing any name changes for tickets purchased for the John Mellencamp event on Tuesday Aug 17th, NO EXCEPTIONS will be accommodated for this event.
Tickets will only be available for pickup at the box office starting at 6 PM on Tuesday night. If you are receiving this email as a ticket purchaser, you will need to bring with you; the AMEX card used to purchase the tickets and an ID.
If you realize that you will be unable to provide the listed forms of ID on Tuesday night, I have authorized Ticketmaster to offer refunds of your tickets only until 12 NOON Monday August 16th. Any requests after that time will be denied and tickets will also not be available for any other persons to pick up.
If you choose to cancel the tickets, I will be able to directly sell your customer referral a ticket at the face value of $40 with payment through AMEX only, pending verification of your ticket order cancellation.
Addressing our scalper issue:
Why are we doing this? Seems there are some individuals included in this email from such 2nd party ticket outlets (scalpers to the venue hosts) that we are tracking including Santa Monica Tickets, Lasportsfan, ticketfeeder, razorgator, tixketluck, ticketsnow, vividseats, soldout_tickets, mr. carroll, we_will_buy_your_extra_tickets, encoreticketstore, onlinetickethouse, ezticketstub, besides a few others not listed who feel our event is put on for their financial benefit. We are working on making it even tougher for these entities to secure inventory for our future special events and fundraisers.
Future initiatives will include having to pick up your ticket and walk right into the venue on show night. These incredible shows are for real music fans, not for people trying to “provide a service”. We are small enough that we are able to track all the ticket buyers, who are the consistent players and how to minimize participation in our events.
LA Live and LAPD undercover officers will be on site to ensure that any scalpers, (whom we will indentify to them) will be under a watchful eye and any transactions done near the GRAMMY Museum will be dealt with according to local laws and LA Live guidelines.
If you are a lucky fan that happened to secure tickets alongside the secondary market folks, we apologize for the inconvenience these other entities have forced us into acting upon.
Sincerely,
GRAMMY Museum Box Office
