The physical ticket – to a gig or a play or a comedy show or a sporting event – is a vanishing entity. It has been, or at least is being, replaced by the e-ticket conveniently mailed to your inbox (a state of affairs that curiously doesn’t seem to have negated the need for a handling charge), or the QR code, swiftly scanned on your phone.
It probably won’t be long before it vanishes entirely, consigned to the dustbin of history with all the other pop cultural ephemera we no longer need: mountains of DVDs; fanclubs that furnished us with badges and posters by mail; the lost art of taping songs off the radio.
