PayPal Lets Festival Attendees Pay By Wristband

In its fifth year partnering with the Outside Lands Music and Arts Festival in San Francisco this past weekend, PayPal let attendees try out a bold payment concept—the RFID festival wristband.

The bracelet acts as a festival ticket, but can also be loaded with money via PayPal, letting festival attendees make payments with the flick of a wrist. For this weekend’s festival, all participating food and drink vendors accepting the wearable payment option, and a couple of vendors only accepted cashless payments. Outside Lands organizers also sweetened the deal by adding $5.00 in their Bison Bucks credits for every $75 a user loaded onto her wristband.

It’s a pretty new payment concept, and one that major companies have lately been exploring, occasionally with a biometric authentication aspect too, as with the Nymi Band payment trials. And it certainly isn’t unheard-of for the time-worn concept of the concert wristband to be injected with new technological capabilities, as can be seen in 2014’s Lightwave wearable, designed by a DJ to let her track the biometric responses of her audience. Now, with alternative payment concepts like mPayments starting to catch on, digital wristband wallets could become a more popular solution for festival attendees interested in leaving their wallets and payment cards at home.