WTF Bob Dylan? A friend who is offline is blocked from buying tickets to Bob Dylan in Antwerp, Belgium. The concert is effectively exclusively for online people. Most likely cash payers must fuck off.

It’s exactly the kind of shit Bob Dylan should be bitching about in his songs. WTF, Bob Dylan?

Dudes 86 and way past giving a shit

As in you can only purchase tickets online? This has sadly become common practice, where at best ticket providers just require an email address (to email the digital ticket to), but at worst requiring: email address, full name, password (for account creation), date of birth, gender, full address, phone number, and aggressive bot detection scripts (presumably against ticket scalping); most of which used to market upcoming events, based on demographic.

The last one I attended still accepted payment at the door (which is rare enough), but refused to accept cash when I tried... But at least I limited information directly available to the ticket provider and venue; which is something.

where you’re required to go through a full KYC process (full name, address, email address, etc.); just to purchase a ticket.

Woah, wtf.. I’ve not been to a large concert or game in ages, so I guess I’ve become out of touch with some of the oppressive tyranny that the pushover masses are enabling with their obedient unconditional patronage. I could not find a good source for what you’re saying, but I found this apparently bot-generated page: https://smarteventspayment.com/the-role-of-kyc-in-event-ticket-sales/

At 1st I got the impression it was so the ticket seller could mitigate scalping, but then the article mentions “compliance”, which implies there are now laws to spread the KYC tyranny beyond banks (considering how easily masses of plebs went along with it) -- even if the ticket seller wants to respect people’s human rights¹.

The perverse irony is the nonsense claim that KYC /reduces/ identity theft. Surely it’s the other way around. Identity thieves need not penetrate a bank when they can simply exfiltrate the data from a poorly secured ticket seller.

In any case, the existence of KYC between a bank and customer does not in the slightest justify having KYC between Bob Dylan and his fans. In fact, it’s the contrary. Because banks know their customer and also sees their purchase of concert tickets, who can then alert authorities if appropriate, there is no need for redundancy. As well, if the ticket seller is doing their own KYC, there is no justification for excluding unbanked people from the event.

Crazy that email address would be required. That would also effectively exclude my friend even if he could buy a ticket over the counter.

¹ Regarding human rights, there is a human right to privacy, autonomy, self-determinism, and a right to have access to culture and works thereof. Making a concert exclusive for people who are banked and also online violates all these human rights.

I've edited my comment for clarification, because KYC might've been an overstatement here. Perhaps "compliance" with a financial institution's due diligence process to support their KYC obligations; it having a trickling-down effect. But like I've said in my now edited comment, the excessive detail gathered by ticket providers, seems to primarily serve marketing purposes. And although there might be nothing legally stopping one from providing false information, the provided information might be passed onto a third party (Google with reCAPTCHA being an example), comparing it to entries provided to other websites: detecting anomalies and returning a risk-score relating to mitigation steps (additional challenges, denial of service, or follow-up contact). Over the counter ticket sales for events I'm attending are practically non-existent, and door-sales are not providing any guarantees, besides also being extremely rare.