When did scanning barcoded tickets at events become the norm? I recently stumbled upon some concert tickets from the 1970s and 1980s which don’t have barcodes, and it made me curious.
I’ve recall it starting around four years ago. It’s certainly possible it took me a decade or more to notice.
It started about the time that Ticketmaster started offering print-at-home tickets.
I remember that at first they used to charge extra for using the print-at-home option. I don’t know if this helps, since I don’t remember when they started print-at-home, but I would say it was early this century.
yeah. they’ve even released a smartphone app and all you have to do at the door is show them your phone and they’ll scan the QR code on the screen.
As someone who has attended a lot of sporting events and concerts, I’d say around 2000 or so is the turning point for the norm of scanning versus tearing the ticket.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
Yes, this was my experience. I took my daughter and two of her friends to an Aerosmith concert for her graduation in 2000 and bought the tickets through Ticket master by mail. At last minute she asked another friend so we bought one more off of a scalper in the parking lot and it turned out to be for yesterday’s concert! We just handed the guy all of the tickets and he tore them and handed them back. They had bar codes on the tickets, but no bar code readers at the door. Haven’t bought a ticket in the parking lot since.
My sense is that scanning as the norm is about ten years old–I moved to LA in 2002 and I go to a couple baseball games a year, I don’t recall getting tickets scanned in the early days. They may have been barcoded but weren’t scanned. I think scanning became the norm when print-at-home became available, because unless you scan them it’s pretty easy to fake a ticket. As mentioned above, with the old style paper tickets you can try to get away with one for the wrong day, but it would have been pretty hard to actually counterfeit them.