Once Again, Brown Paper Tickets Can't Seem to Pay Their Customers
Chris Peterson, OnStage Blog Founder
Since last year, two schools in Georgia have been waiting to be paid their ticket revenue, raised from their productions. The problem is that the ticket-selling vendor hasn’t paid them yet and there’s no sign of when the schools have been paid.
North Atlanta High School and Sutton Middle School have been waiting for Brown Paper Tickets to send them the $24,030 they owe the schools for ticket sales through their service. Sutton Middle School is owed $9,355 for ticket sales from November 2022 for their performance of Beauty and the Beast.
North Atlanta High School is owed a total of $14,675 - $780 for the One Act play in November 2022, and $13,895 for the musical Legally Blonde in March 2023.
“Both schools were selling tickets, as they’d done traditionally, using this company they thought they could rely on, and unfortunately, got abused by the company,” said Kristin Childers, a theatre booster at North Atlanta High School.
To make matters even worse, the schools have not heard anything from Brown Paper Tickets or their parent company Events.com. Calls and emails have not been returned and customer service lines aren’t picking up.
“Both of these organizations are self-funded for their arts programs. So they depend on ticket sales from the shows one year to finance the shows the next year,” Childers said to local news.
Sadly, these schools aren’t alone in feeling the burden of BPT’s poor business decisions. Last month, two music ensembles in New Hampshire had to threaten legal action to be paid for their events. An off-Broadway theatre troupe also reported that BPT still owes them thousands of dollars. And festival organizers in Chicago report that they are still owed more than $20,000 for their events.
This is far from the first time this has happened with BPT and there was hope that these issues had been corrected. In 2020, I reported that BPT wasn’t able to pay their customers the revenue they were owed. They blamed COVID-19, but all the pandemic did was expose the poor business model and decision-making happening at BPT.
Back in 2020, I spoke with sources at other ticket companies who confirmed that the problems at BPT could only be caused by awful bookkeeping practices.
“Speaking with sources at other ticket management companies, ticket revenue collected from these events typically goes into accounts protected for these customers. These companies charged service fees which are separated into a different account. For instance, BPT charges $0.99 + 5% of the ticket price for their services. Those are the only revenue that BPT and other companies should be getting. They shouldn’t be dipping into other ticket revenue to pay their employees or other costs. Many have suggested that this is exactly what was happening at BPT.
Under this scenario, BPT could continue to dip into ticket revenue to pay their own costs as long as more ticket revenue was coming in. So if Event A was owed $10,000, BPT could delay payments or send in installations and pay them with revenue coming from Event B. And then Event B would be paid from Event C.”
By October 2020, Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson filed a lawsuit against BPT, accusing the company of failing to pay event organizers and not refunding consumers for tickets they purchased. The case was settled for $9 million and many of those swindled of their funds were able to get some, if not all, of them paid.
But why is this happening again? Something tells me that those at BPT didn’t learn their lesson and are back to doing business the way that got them in trouble in the first place. I hope I’m wrong. I also hope no one ever uses BPT or events.com ever again.