On his Cool Tools blog, Kevin Kelly describes his love for Brown Paper Tickets, a teensy ticketing David to the Ticketmaster Goliath. They don’t gouge customers with outrageous fees, and they’re fair to venues as well, he writes, providing great service and paying promptly.

Brown Paper Tickets is one of several alternative online ticket vendors for anyone hosting a ticketed event. Might be a ball, a fundraiser, a race, a concert, or an exhibit. At Long Now we’ve used them and can recommend them highly.

Brown Paper Tickets bills themselves as “fair-trade” ticketing. What that means is that they offer a fair deal to both the consumer and the venue. BPT provides the lowest consumer fees on tickets (99 cents and 2.5%), with no add-on overcharges, and free first class postage. For hosts setting up an event, they offer fantastic 24/7 live-person phone support, a clean usable website, and cheap (10 cent) printed secure tickets. They offer venue hosts other goodies too. You have control over when to stop sales, how to customize the ticket, ways to manage multiple events, means to offer media tickets, assigned seating, and so on.

Plus, they give you real-time sales, and pay up promptly! Try that with Ticketmaster.

Now the bad news: you can’t use an up-and-comer like Brown Paper Tickets unless your venue can, which makes the whole issue rather academic for now. What you can do is make sure your favorite local venues know about BPT so they can look at it for themselves.

Brown Paper Tickets: Fair Trade Ticketing [Cool Tools]
(Photo: Jakob.Enos)

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