Eric Church

There's an old saying, "If you're going to talk the talk, you've got to walk the walk," and while many have complained loudly about the prevalence of ticket scalping pricing out the mainstream music fan, Eric Church has actually done something about it. Using proprietary technology, Church has been able to weed out scalpers, canceling thousands of scalped tickets and reimbursing them to those through his fan club. Now more of his longtime fans can afford to witness the three-hour-plus shows on his current "Holdin' My Own" tour. Here, he explains his anti-scalping strategy, as well as offers his insight into his new album, changes in the music business, and Country music in general.

How were you able to cancel thousands of tickets bought by scalpers to re-sell them to individual fans?

It took a lot of effort. Between my Outsiders tour and this current tour, the technology has caught up to a point where it helped us learn a lot of ways to ID scalpers. A tech company helped write a code that triggers when it identifies them. We're able to look at them across our buyer base, identify the ones who trigger our alert, and pull them out.

But the biggest thing for us on this tour was to explain the situation to our fans ... that this was a way to make sure they'll only have to pay face value. Since scalpers have an unfair advantage, we had our fans going to our fan club to order and be involved in our presale. Most fan clubs limit pre-sales to 2,000-3,000 seats, but we opened the entire venues. Some shows basically sold out in fan presale before tickets had a chance to go on-sale to the public, then we put second shows on sale. For me, the great thing about that was that we knew exactly who were buying the tickets through our fan club. We know their e-mail addresses and credit card info, and we're able to communicate with them directly.

Exactly how does this screening process work?

After the Outsiders tour, our technology started to pick up identifiers in the ticket purchases. I can't talk about it a whole lot because what we found out is that scalpers are kinda like hackers. Once they know how we're catching them, they'll change the way they do it. I can say they have patterned behaviors. Some of them are obvious, such as when we're playing a show in Des Moines and there are 2,500 ticket requests from 20 bogus names in New York or Las Vegas. You look at it and go, "That doesn't look quite right." Those are the obvious signs.

But to me, again, the biggest thing to make this work is being able to convince and educate our fans. It's important for them to be involved with the fan club presale to get the best chance to buy tickets. By guaranteeing that if they do that, they'll not only pay face value, but they'll have a chance to buy every seat in the arena, we get to better know who they are. It really has been an education of the fan base on why doing this extra step is worth that it, because you won't be forced to pay $400-$600 for an $89 ticket. Plus, our fans end up policing themselves. They turn into one of our biggest assets with our "when you see it, post it" on our website. They let us know who could be scalping my tickets. We kinda turned it into our own technology to keep scalpers on their heels. Once we identity them, we cancel their ticket numbers, then re-sell those numbers through our fan club.

Although we can't solve the problem of scalping tickets, we can do something to solve the problem of scalping our tickets. It's personal to me. I want it to be so difficult for scalpers to purchase my tickets, through the risk of cancellation, that it won't be worth it for them ... and to move on to something else. It would be great if everybody does this, but it would have to become personal to them, too. At the very least, we can really put a dent in scalping.

Have you heard from other artists about adopting your anti-scalping strategy?

Yes, I have heard from several artists who called after we cancelled about 40,000 tickets in one day. About six or seven contacted me and said they would love to hear more about how we use this proprietary technology; we're the only people using it. It's critical that this matters to the other artists -- and I believe it should matter -- because this shouldn't be an economics problem.

You know, everyone say scalping is just capitalism, when someone invests in tickets and just marks them up. But I remember where I came from; I want that guy -- a father with probably two kids now -- who paid $15 to see me where I used to play ... I want him to still come to my shows today and get a decent seat. He helped build my foundation. I'm basically a product and I can set whatever price I want - and I want to set prices so that guy can afford to come and still be a part of my career.

Other artists start alienating those people for those who can afford a $500 ticket. That's short-term money. It's no way to build an audience and strengthen our culture; it will hurt us all in the end. If we truly believe our careers are about the fans, we have to realize that those ticket prices are more about the scalpers, who get healthy by forcing fans to pay through the nose for good seats. It doesn't make me feel good when one of my fans goes on Stub Hub to pay $1,000 for a ticket in Chicago ... and $900 of that profit goes to someone I don't know and has no skin in the game.

Let's talk about the most recent album, Mr. Misunderstood. Did you do anything different in making this album?

This one was a complete surprise for me. Back in 2015, I said many times that I didn't want to do another album; I certainly didn't need a new one. I just came off the Outsiders Tour, which did well, and I wanted to take some time off. But for whatever reason, I would just sit down and write a song in a day. I wrote "Three Year Old" in one day, and the next day wrote "Mr. Misunderstood," and the day after that I wrote "Round Here Buzz," and 10 to 12 days later, I had it all done. This had never happened before. Before, I'd write 100 songs just to find 12 cohesive ones. It's the first time I wrote just 14 songs for a 10-song album - and all 14 could've made it. It was a strange way that just happened. I've never been that creative and it's interesting -- whatever opened up that brief window, it never happened before and since.

So I had this record's worth of material that nobody knew about. I called my producer and manager and told them I wanted to come into the studio and cut one song ... "Just humor me" ... so I came in and cut "Mr. Misunderstood." When it was over with, I asked if I could come back tomorrow because I happened to have another one. I basically did that for 10 days straight ... a song a day ... and it was done; I had a record nobody knew I had and I didn't really need to release.

So I looked at it and thought, "What in hell do I do with this?" It was August, and we came up with the notion of doing a surprise release in November. That would be a good time to get the most exposure, but I didn't want to tell the label because the people there can't keep secrets very well. I told my manager and producer, "Let's do it ourselves," so we bought a record pressing plant in Germany in order get it done on time. We pressed the CDs and all the artwork; they arrived in the U.S. in late October and we treated it like a Christmas album; it truly was a gift to our fans in every sense of the word, as we sold it through our fan club starting November 3rd. We shipped it by snail mail -- a vinyl album with its own CD -- to over 80,000 fans, who got it the day before the CMA Awards, where I debuted "Mr. Misunderstood." Then we sent the single to radio a week later.

Again, we didn't tell anybody at the label about this. It was utter complete chaos ... and the most fun I ever had. The label wondered if it was pirated; nobody knew it was coming. We let fans become our mouthpiece, which is the opposite of how we do things in the industry. Normally, everybody hears it before the fans - the labels, critics and radio ... all these people usually hear it before the fans can buy it, which I thought it was backwards. We gave it to the fans and the interesting thing is that it still worked commercially. We still sold a lot of records as if it came out the same way.

How has the trend towards digital sales impacted how your fans consume or enjoy your music?

You think about the fans first in the same way we deal with the scalpers. Everyone says that but we built a fan base that has its own culture. For example, say on one night I'll play in Moline. I'll play 39 songs and probably 20-22 of them will be album cuts, yet 7,000-8,000 in that audience will be singing along to everything.

A culture of downloads and singles is no way to build a fan base. That would be like picking up a book and only reading the first chapter. What an album can do is tell the audience about your life, and give them a culture to build around. So when the time came to release the record, we had a lot of options in releasing the music. We decided to trust our fans; they got us here and I wanted to get my music directly to where it belongs - the fans.

How do you build that culture when some fans buys albums, but more and more are streaming music?

We want to appeal to both camps; this is where our culture is important. We understand there will be those who'll just buy albums and not songs, and there are those who will stream a song or two. In the latter case, what happens is that, by and large, when the more casual fans - who may stream one or two of my songs -- come to my shows and see all these people singing to all the songs as if every one was a #1 hit, the casual fans would go home and start streaming all my old albums.

But to get them to buy the entire album, it has to be a cohesive thing. You can't take just four songs off the album to radio and put six shitty songs on there as well. It doesn't work that way when you're only picking the low-hanging fruit for singles. If you make the entire album about art, it can still work commercially.

There has been some controversy in Country circles about the influence of pop crossover. Where do you stand on that?

I'm okay with it if it's true to the artist, but it's not okay if you do it just for commercial reasons or because you want to attract a different demo. That's wrong if it's not you. I grew up on classic Country, but I also grew up on rock and roll. It was very prevalent in my teenage years. There was AC/DC in every truck I jumped into back then, and there was Bob Seger and Bruce Springsteen all going on during that time as well. If I think back to that time when I make an album, that music is in my DNA. I don't have to try make an album more rock sounding; that's what I was raised on. That mixes with influences such as Johnny Cash, George Jones, Merle and Lefty ... all this stuff generationally is what I listened to, and it's only right to be true to who you are. But it's not okay if you're doing it to sell more records or appeal to different demos if it's not who you are. It all goes back to the blues anyway; at some point, we're all stealing from that.

As someone who is passionate about your art and the culture surrounding your music, what goes through your mind when you're sitting at award shows such as the CMAs and you find yourself competing against your peers and heroes in various categories?

I usually think about the dinner afterwards. For me, I'm always pretty surprised to even be there, because if you told me in 2009 or 2010 that I'd even be nominated for Best Male Artist, Entertainer or Album of the Year, I'd say no way that'd happen to me. I'm always appreciative just to be there and be up for an award, win or lose. But truth be told, there is one award I take the most pride in and I covet the most, and that's Album of the Year. That's what I work the hardest on.

I'm a student of Country music and the history of the ACMs and the CMAs, so to be there among my peer group, many of whom are the same artists I used to be a fan of, is a surreal feeling and it's very gratifying. This truly is a community. I haven't been around a lot of other artists in other genres, so I don't know for sure, but I don't expect that they have the kind of community we have. That's one thing that separates Country music from the other genres out there.

Considering how spontaneous you created - and then toured to support - your latest album, have you had time to reflect on your work and what you accomplished over the past year or two?

It was very satisfying to release an album our own way - when people tell us we're crazy for doing it, that we're leaving so many sales on the table and we're screwing ourselves - and we still surprised the retailers with how well it has done. To see it come full circle ... one of these nights, I'm going to be able to sit back, reflect and feel so glad I did it this way, to take a risk and just jump out there, and it all ends up working. Once the tour started, we haven't had time to do it, but when it ends, I'm finally going to take some time off to look at the past 18 months and evaluate where we are. I really have to force myself to take some time off and get back into a schedule where I can calm down, take time to process everything and reflect on my life.

Then the next question will pop up on what we're going to do next. Of course I don't know that yet. I can't envision what I can do to recreate what I did the last time, because the previous four albums did not happen that way. It starts with looking for a good song as a cohesive thing. Every album has a cornerstone song that you build around. Once you get that song, you can start formulating what kind of album it will be.