In recent years, there's been a lot of talk in the music industry about how to combat the bots that routinely buy up concert tickets on behalf of scalpers. One prominent rock band's solution involves ticket buyers having their eyeballs scanned to prove they're human.
Thirty Seconds To Mars, the hard rock combo led by actor Jared Leto (who was accused of sexual misconduct by nine women last year), is deploying an online ticketing tool called Concert Kit for their 2027 tour of Europe and the UK. According to the San Francisco Standard, the system involves each customer creating a verified World ID, an encrypted digital passport created by an orb that scans your irises and face. It uses "proof of human" technology developed by Tools For Humanity, a company founded by OpenAI's Sam Altman. To get a World ID, you have to visit an official World store or a partner retailer and have your eyes scanned.
The technology allegedly blocked 100,000 automated requests for free tickets to the Humans Only Concert last month at the Midway in San Francisco featuring St. Vicious, a team-up of St. Vincent and DJ Pee .Wee (an alter ego of Anderson .Paak). Tools For Humanity says 1,000 humans and their plus-ones were able to obtain tickets, and all bots were denied. "While there’s a lot of important things that you can solve with World ID, I think concerts and music [are] so near and dear to our hearts that we were excited to help solve this problem,” the company's Tiago Sada told the Standard. "We were blown away by the response."
Thirty Seconds To Mars are not making every ticket buyer scan their eyeballs. Instead of universally deploying the Concert Kit technology, they're setting aside a portion of tickets in Munich, Berlin, Hanover, London, and Manchester for buyers with World IDs, thus allowing some customers to opt out of the technology while still having a shot at a ticket. "From a philosophical perspective, we think that World ID should be optional,” Sada told the Standard. "Certainly, there may be fans that, for whatever reason, prefer to not join the system yet, or they just don’t have an orb near them, and I think it’s important that they have the ability to buy tickets just like they would."
