To spare concertgoers the nuisance of buying tickets by phone and picking them up at the box office, major promoters have teamed up with an information technology firm to begin limited sales of tickets by use of electric money, officials said Monday.Late last month, the All-Japan Concert Tour Promoters' Conference, in collaboration with Mitsui Knowledge Industry Com., made 550 tickets available for each of four concerts through the new service. The concerts include one to be held by Chara today and three by different Japanese artists to be held around late November in and around Tokyo.Customers selected to participate in the test marketing have been given exclusive IC card decoders for use with their home computers. The user downloads concert data, including dates and venues, from the Internet and onto their cards, which then serve as the tickets for the concert, the promoters said.If proven feasible, they said, the system will help customers easily acquire tickets round the clock while enabling promoters to run concerts and other entertainment events more effectively for a broader range of consumers who would otherwise be too busy to book tickets.
