If you are attending the Wakestock festival this summer, you will be part of history as Wakestock is the first multi-day festival in the UK which will no longer rely on paper tickets for entry, but rather, encourage the use of wristbands instead. Red Hot Chili Peppers has the honor as the first band to use such wristbands in place of tickets. Basically, the wristbands will be scanned as music fans start to make their way into the venue – scanning is also done another time as they leave. This might be new to the UK, but it is already a widely used form of control at concerts in North America.
Coachella in California has started to implement ticketless systems since 2010, where it also included integrated social media tools for festival-goers to check-in in a painless manner. Wristbands only started to arrive on European shores earlier this year, and were most recently used at Eurosonic Noorderslag festival in Groningen, Holland. They might resemble standard material festival bands as you can see above, but have been fitted with a microchip that can be scanned with the right reader. [Image credit: idcband.co.uk]
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