Ticketmaster Sells Out and Buys Into Facial Recognition Technology
The distribution giant wants to get to know you better, and it’s all totally legal — for now.
No one attends a concert expecting to be remembered. Hot lights turn towards the stage, away from the crowd. Performers look out into a pulsing sea of shadowed faces. The whole point of a concert is to disappear for a while and lose yourself in the music. Aside from an ID scan at a checkpoint and maybe a swipe of a credit card, there is no better place to blend in. For all of its riotous noise, its rapturous chanting, a concert is a still point. It offers a tantalizing break from the tedium of ordinary life, with its emails and its bills and its appointments and its ceaseless social media notifications. Your identity matters less than your capacity to contribute to the collective energy of this space. Your voice hoarse from singing, from shouting. Your body swaying with the rocking undulation of the crowd. Your winsome idolatry. And while you can hold onto this rich sense of belonging for a moment, eventually (bootlegged recordings notwithstanding), you must let it go. To be a concertgoer is to covet a fleeting connection. As good as it gets, you can’t take it with you.
And, importantly, neither can they. Promoters and performers alike mark the success of an event by the numbers, by the documented attendance and…
