Purchasing Concert Tickets in 2025 in Manchester: The "Modern" Experience
I recently spent a couple of days around here just testing the "terrain" in order to better understand how large public venues, for concerts rather than sporting events like football, currently "work".
"Modern" means new and since the arena near us is very new we reckoned it would make a good "case study".
It would be common sense to assume mobile phones don't always work (they can run out of battery, set aside technical issues), so surely people receive physical tickets, right?
Wrong.
Well, many places no longer issue physical tickets, but "there's always a way", as they say...
On two different days I received contradictory responses from two different members of staff. On the latter occasion she had to escalate to a boss before it became evident that they can in fact print a ticket (at first I received a false answer, repeatedly; after confronting that falsehood a correction was issued). They otherwise talk like a script about "app" and, failing that, "text message". Rather useless for blind people (they do take pride in accessibility) or people who for many other reasons cannot use some digital gadget. Over a million Brits don't use (not own) a mobile phone; should they be excluded and left out? Thankfully not, or not yet. Those people are not dumb of "Luddites"; their motivations are usually logical and Luddites are a false analogy. We wrote about why only a few days ago.
Next, the question of cash payments. They now insist they are "cashless" (bad buzzword, also a misnomer), though other members of staff gave me different answers. So they are inconsistent, depending on who you ask and on what day. You ask about the hypothetical young person who has no bank account, hence no card. Then they say someone who accompanies like a parent can pay for you. But that generally implies purchasing a ticket in anonymity might be impossible, save or except for the potential of cash payments (maybe a different shift supervisor would kindly unveil another "hidden option").
It's not so pleasant to test them, but they were moderately polite. Nobody was combative, even when they gave false or misleading answers.
Lastly, discounted or "verified resale" tickets are not available in the ticket office (or box office, they call it "fan service"), which means that those who do things the "Traditional" way get a different tier of prices. That seems rather unfair, one might say discriminatory; but many stores that vend food do the same when they give special price only to those who present a "loyalty" card with a name on them (so the list of purchases can be sold to advertisers and even more nefarious entities).
To summarise: the good is, physical tickets are possible (but they try to hide or deny that), cash payments are probably not possible (maybe it is in exceptional circumstances or if you ask the "right" person), deals are not available for those not using skinnerboxes/webapps, and anonymity seems close to impossible (they did the same in most football matches almost a decade ago; unless you take the risk of approaching scalpers). █