Theatres left HOLDING THE BAG
U.S.-based online ticket seller owes thousands to companies hit hard by COVID-19
At the beginning of March, Chris Stanton and his independent theatre company had just premiered their biggest hit.
“We were on track to break our own little box-office records,” he said.
Tickets were selling fast for their production of Ella Hickson’s “Oil” even before its first preview on Feb. 29. Audiences were intrigued by the large cast, centuries-spanning plot about oil production and consumption, and an impressive set inside a small venue near Dufferin Street and Davenport Road.
But two weeks into the run, the coronavirus pandemic made large gatherings impossible and the production was forced to shut down.
Almost three months later, Stanton says he has not received a penny from his online ticket sales. The web-based ticketing agency Brown Paper Tickets, which managed the advance ticket sales for “Oil,” still owes Stanton $8,117 from 15 performances and three others that were cancelled, he said. “That’s a huge chunk of our revenue that has gone AWOL — completely missing.”
“In our account terminal, they’ve got five cheques that say they are processed. But nothing has actually been sent to us in any way, shape, or form,” he said. “It’s a real nightmare. There’s absolutely zero word from Brown Paper Tickets.”
Seattle-based Brown Paper Tickets serves small, independent theatre productions and concerts by handling their box office sales for a low fee.
Artists across North America were affected when the company stopped processing payments. In Washington state, the attorney general has received more than 200 complaints claiming Brown Paper Tickets owes artists more than $1.1 million (U.S.) since COVID-19 hit.
The pandemic has forced many sectors of the economy to close and thrown millions of people out of work.
Theatre companies that use Brown Paper Tickets to sell seats have been hit doubly hard. First COVID forced them to shut down, and now many can’t even get the proceeds from shows that ran before the crisis struck.
The Star spoke to 11 theatre companies in Toronto, Edmonton and Vancouver, who collectively say they’re owed more than $50,000 in ticket sales.
“I just couldn’t believe it,” said producer Marianne Sawchuk, who said she is owed more than $1,100. “I just had that sinking feeling … Think about how many people are going to be completely wiped out.”
Without the proceeds from ticket sales, ticket holders for cancelled shows haven’t been able to get refunds and the production companies themselves may be forced to declare bankruptcy.
“Although we don’t presently have an estimated timeline, we are continuing to work toward resolving outstanding payments and refunds,” said Brown Paper Tickets president William Scott Jordan in a statement emailed to the Star.
“Our business was hit hard by the COVID-19 crisis, causing extended delays in payments and refunds to our customers. We are deeply sorry that our situation is creating greater hardship for the artists and event organizers we built our business to serve, and we are working to make it right.
“Separately, we are taking significant measures to better protect event organizers’ payments going forward and ensure those using our platform to ticket current and future events are paid in a timely manner.”
Brown Paper Tickets did not say how many Canadian artists are affected, nor how much money they are owed in total. The company did not address the specific cases cited in this report.
Thousands of independent artists across Canada do not have access to their own box office system, an expensive and time-consuming production element usually performed by an entire department in large venues. They instead rely on thirdparty services to fulfil this role.
On the largest end of the scale is Ticketmaster, on the smaller end are sites like Eventbrite and Brown Paper Tickets. Since its inception in 2000, Brown Paper Tickets has promoted itself as a disrupter to the ticketing industry, a “fair-trade ticketing company” with a “NotJust-For-Profit” mandate. It donates five per cent of its profits to non-profits and pays employees a week’s salary to do volunteer work each year.
“Brown Paper Tickets builds communities through events, donations, setting a higher bar for good corporate citizenship, and a business model that builds a better world,” the company stated in a 2014 press release.
Supported by a simple interface, Brown Paper Tickets offers strong customer service and a low service fee for buyers (99 cents plus five per cent of the ticket price) and no fee for event organizers. The company pledges quick payments, with cheques for ticket revenue sent out within 10 business days of the performance date.
In 2011, the privately-held company reported that it had facilitated more than 250,000 events in its first decade and averaged 200 per cent growth each year. Now operating in 68 countries, Brown Paper Tickets has grown to become the 8th-largest ticketing company in the world, according to a 2014 press release.
Before COVID-19, it was one of the most common ways, if not the most common, to buy tickets to an independent theatre production in Toronto. Many of the artists the Star spoke to said they have encouraged others to use the service and praised its price point and reliable customer service. Stanton said he has been “evangelical” in his support of it.
Since the pandemic caused widespread postponements and cancellations, American artists have reported not receiving cheques and said that those they did receive bounced, according to a report in the Seattle Times.
“The thing that I think I resent the most about this is that Brown Paper Tickets, as a company, has elected to somehow see their own suffering as above everyone else’s,” said Stanton, whose company doesn’t qualify for the government’s COVID-19 economic relief programs. The loss of this ticket revenue from “Oil” will have significant repercussions next season.
“This is our bread and butter and to not be able to rely on ticketing revenue, it’s a huge blow,” he said. “We’re all going through a huge disruptive crisis, the very least you owe to your consumers is transparency.”
The artists who spoke to the Star shared a deep frustration with the company’s communication and customer service. They say attempts to contact the company resulted in boilerplate statements, long hold times that lead nowhere, or radio silence.
The company’s social channels have been dormant since midMarch, save for an official statement on May 19, which explained that after its automated systems failed, “we abruptly stopped payments to protect our business; we didn’t clearly communicate what we knew when we knew it.”
“We temporarily laid off most of our staff, which means transactions are piling up and becoming more complicated, and we don’t have enough hands to manage the crushing workload,” the statement read. “The result has been a snarl of delayed payments, revoked checks, stalled refunds and, understandably, angry customers.
“We are actively pursuing loans and outside funding sources so we can bring back members of our team to speed up processing payments and responses to requests. We are prioritizing payments to people with outstanding checks and people whose events were successfully completed.”
Although the company has more than $1.5 million outstanding to artists across Canada and the U.S., the Brown Paper Tickets website still allows new users to create accounts and put tickets up for sale.
Director Brenley Charkow completed her production of Stef Smith’s “Girl in the Machine” with her Edmonton-based company Bustle & Beast in early March. She received the first of five cheques she was owed, but is still missing $7,260 in ticket sales.
“I’ve called the company multiple times until the point where they stopped taking calls altogether. I was emailing every other day and I would always get the standard auto-reply where they’re apologizing for the delays and saying that I am still in the queue and hopefully will be getting paid sooner rather than later,” she said.
After about a month, Charkow started reaching out to colleagues to see if they were also having issues with Brown Paper Tickets. Along with Toronto producer Derrick Chua, she gathered testimonies to gauge the severity of the situation. After reading that U.S. artists were complaining to the Washington State attorney general’s office, they filed a complaint as well.
Since early March, state Attorney General Bob Ferguson has received 201 complaints about Brown Paper Tickets, five of them from Canadians, his office confirmed to the Star in an email, alleging a total of $1.5 million outstanding.
“That’s a large number of complaints in a relatively short period of time,” he said. “We take this very seriously, as we always do when we receive numerous complaints about a particular company.”
Through an informal complaint resolution process, 58 complaints have been resolved and $272,000 returned, Ferguson’s office confirmed.
“While the outcome for these consumers are positive, many complaints remain unresolved,” Ferguson said.
Toronto’s Marianne Sawchuk, who produced a festival of one-act plays “Women At Play(s) 4 TO Edition” at Leslieville’s Red Sandcastle Theatre from Feb. 27 to March 8, has tried to chase down her missing $1,120, mostly during her breaks as an emergency room nurse.
“I told them I’m a front-line worker and I don’t want to spend my time on my days off and all my breaks trying to get through to you guys, but they did have the courtesy to send the same standard email saying that they will email me with a response and I didn’t hear anything about it,” she said. “What’s unfair is that they already took their cut and now they’re also holding our money and leaving me hanging.”
Due to her budget management and the collective nature of her project, Sawchuk said she’s in OK financial shape, even if she doesn’t get the money she’s owed. She’s continuing to push Brown Paper Tickets to stand up for the performing arts industry, which has already suffered devastating losses during the pandemic.
“Even though it’s not a lot of money, on principle, you can’t treat artists like that,” she said. “I’m trying to use every angle I have because to disrespect artists at this time, when they’re already hurting so badly, it’s just like a kick to the teeth when they’re down.”
The biggest amount the Star found is owed is to Vancouver’s Highlands United Church Productions, which had to cancel its biennial musical “Anything Goes.”
Production director Douglas Irwin said the church is short $22,288, which in turn is owed to advance ticket buyers who requested refunds. To those who chose to turn their tickets into donations for the Church — which Irwin said was encouraged by Brown Paper Tickets — Highlands United isn’t able to issue tax receipts until they receive that money from the company.
“Right now it seems like most people are being very patient. Those of us that are at the organizational level are the ones that are more concerned, just because the amount of money not yet coming to us is very significant,” Irwin told the Star.
He says the church hired a lawyer to send a letter demanding the outstanding amount from Brown Paper Tickets, but hasn’t received a response. Like Sawchuk, he and the church leaders are preparing for the worst.
“We simply may have to bite the
“The thing that I think I resent the most about this is that Brown Paper Tickets, as a company, has elected to somehow see their own suffering as above everyone else’s.”
CHRIS STANTON INDEPENDENT THEATRE DIRECTOR
bullet and move on, and who knows how we handle that. I don’t know. We are a church organization and it’s a significant part of the money that we need,” he said.
Any legal action would be complicated if Brown Paper Tickets goes bankrupt.
For Edmonton director Charkow, the silver lining is that she is not alone in a world faced with unprecedented challenges due to the pandemic.
“It’s nice to know that my company is not the only one affected by this, and that there’s a bunch of us who are all sort of working our way through this together,” she said.