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Microchipped Wristbands - Stopping Touts Or Marketing Ploy?

Everyone and his uncle is talking about how these 'are the future of festival wristbands'.

Posted 24th January 2012, 1:22pm in Blogs by Alex Lynham
Alex Lynham

Alex Lynham

Writer

Microchipped Wristbands - Stopping Touts Or Marketing Ploy? This summer, if you're a regular festivalgoer you might be coming into contact with one of these bad boys. These microchip wristbands are supposedly meant to cut down on ticket touting and allow wearers to pay for on-site purchases electronically, operating in much the same way as London's Oyster Card or the Hong Kong MTR pass (which can also be used at 7-11 branches to purchase goods). Manufactured by a company called Intellitix, they were rolled out across a number of US festivals last year, and made their way across the Atlantic in time for the Eurosonic festival, where they were effectively road-tested by the three thousand attendees. Now everyone and his uncle is talking about how these 'are the future of festival wristbands' to the point that even Michael Eavis was forced to comment on the issue.

Laying aside what the point of the things is for one second – after all, for many years Glastonbury has used photo-tickets and restricted purchasing to curtail the activities of touters – a great concern is what the information gathered can be used for. As anybody who's ever peeked around in Google Analytics can tell you, what people know about you in the internet age is terrifying, and there's something more than a little sinister about data capture at somewhere as apparently benign as a music festival. The data collected could be very valuable, especially in the hands of marketers or festival partners, and attendees would have little control over what this information about them would ultimately be used for. In fact, of Eavis' comments, his most pertinent, and least reported, are on this very issue;

"All the commercial implications of the chip are slightly worrying aren't they? I don't want to take people into a land they don't want to go into... and using information about people, I wouldn't be happy about that."

Don't get me wrong – I like the idea of not carrying cash around, and frankly my usual tactic of a couple of tenners wrapped in a plastic bag in my sock can get pretty sweaty after the first mosh pit, but apart from using this as a way of reducing angst over misplaced coins and notes, I'm not sure what it's supposed to achieve. For the likes of Reading and Leeds, who (to my knowledge) have not yet adopted Glastonbury's more strict ticketing procedures, maybe there's a temptation to go the whole hog and invest in this new technology; but then you can bet there'll be a ticket hike to cover the chips, even though their manufacturer insists they cost “pennies”. Sure, all those kids going to the commercial festivals to show off their designer wellies and their festival chic looks will complain, but I'm sure Daddy will pick up the bill; for the rest of us, it's just another layer to our continuing disillusion with what used to be a couple of weekends of harmless drunken fun in the summer. I guess fundamentally it just feels like a microcosm of the increased commercialisation of music festivals – which if anything has only increased over the last couple of years. Whatever Intellitix's motives, which were probably more-or-less what they claim: elimination of ticket touting and a modern payment solution, the fact is intention and effect will not match up.

So there's my opinion, O Big Commercial Festival Masters: spend a couple of pence more to register people and print photo-tickets à la Glastonbury, and be done with this layer of data collection that will undoubtedly be sold on to your festival's commercial partners in the same way your webstats and Facebook information is. To Jonny Punter I say this: how about not going to V, Reading or any of the big commercial festivals at all and check out a boutique festival instead? Cleaner toilets, smaller stages, no hidden agenda and a better quality of booze await. Oh, and no fucking designer wellies either.
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