Perhaps you missed the date for when tickets went live; maybe you were unorganized and forgot; perhaps, you were actually incredibly prepared, went online 1 hour prior to tickets going live, and sat in a digital queue, behind thousands of others for half a day, just to be told the 2 meagre tickets you wanted were sold out.
Whatever the reason, it's common for fans to miss out on gig tickets. This frustration is then multiplied once fans find third-parties reselling the tickets at unjustifiable prices. What the ticket touts managed to grasp a ticket for £100, your now having to pay £500. This is not an exaggeration: one of the most recent example being Oasis tickets. When the Mancunian rock stars announced their reunion tour last August, general admission, standing and seated were priced anywhere around £100 to £200 at face value. But resellers grasped onto the nostalgia and British pride the the public share with the brothers, setting prices over £6,000. Taylor Swift similarly sold her tickets around the same face value, and saw ticket touters upscale hers to over £3000. The increase is unjustifiable… yet incredibly common.
Unethical economic issues with ticket touting that burdens the music and live events industries
It's not just the fans who are affected however, there are also unethical economic issues with ticket touting that burdens the music and live events industries too. As MP's Justin Madders and Chris Bryant put in the ministerial foreword "Industrial scale touting [is] skewing the market, with none of their profits going back to the live events sector or the local economy", revealing how ticket touters takes away from the hard work artists and venues take to develop, manage and promote their gigs. They exploit the countless roles which contribute to the production of these shows, which usually struggle to make a profit anyway, particularly independent venues and newly-emerging artists. Touters create a profit, and benefit from the combined labour of artists, managers and promoters alike, on and off stage. This profit, if going anywhere, should really be going towards them. Yet this corrupted ticket system adds no additional value to the creative industry.
Instead, money is streamlined into the pockets of touts, who sit behind a screen with their automated "bots". Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy said this rips fans off, as the sophisticated technology can beat those infuriating online queues, and snatch up batches of tickets for coveted shows, only to be resold at sky-high prices.
Thus, the UK government released their legislation. The consultation period was established earlier in the year by the Culture Secretary, which had previously considered a 30% cap on upselling. However this has shifted to completely banning reselling tickets at anything more than face value. Any platform reselling tickets to UK fans will have to comply to the UK government's new legislation. This includes, secondary ticketing platforms and social media websites. The Competition and Markets Authority will regulate the new legislative boundaries, and if businesses break the latter, they risk facing financial penalties of anywhere up to 10% of global turnover.
The legislation has come at a turbulent period, as artists like PJ Harvey, New Order, Dua Lipa and The Cure's Robert Smith have raised concerns over ticket touting. Over in the US as well, the United States Federal Trade Commission and seven states engaged in legal action against unethical ticket reselling. They sued Live Nation and Ticketmaster for "engaging in illegal ticket resale tactics", upscaling the price of illegally purchased tickets. As a result, both platforms earned "hundreds of millions of dollars" from consumers, once again exposing the economic exploitation behind these touting schemes.
However third-party, seondary-ticketing sites, like Viagogo and it's US owner Stubhub, have concerns over fraud. A spokesperson for Viagogo reminded The Guardian that "Evidence shows price caps have repeatedly failed fans - in countries like Ireland and Australia fraud rates are nearly four times higher than in the UK as price caps push consumers towards unregulated sites". The spokesperson for StubHub international also warn that planned price caps regulating the marketplace will move ticketing transaction to black markets. Under this consideration, the prices could potentially rise even more, and fans could be left in a worse position than before.
However, it's likely these opposing concerns are rooted in business insecurity: Stubhub saw it's shares fall 14% on Monday after the plan was reported. "Secondary ticketing" sites benefit heavily from ticket-touts, by charging comission fees: and although the new legislation still allows them to charge these service fees, they will be capped to prevent inflammation. Furthermore, as ticket touts move away from these sites under the new legislation, and potentially to a new black market, it's certain these sites will attract less traffic and start to struggle financially. Their concerns for the public seem like an ingenuine narrative to cover their own vulnerability, as the government targets the corrupted system that uphold their sites.
If regulated well, the legislation will "build a more transparent, accessible and fairer ticketing market that supports the continued growth of the UK’s live events sector". General sale tickets will be more accessible as there will be less competition against touters who can no longer make a profit, and resale tickets more financially accessible, becoming £37 cheaper on average. This will flatten the frustration of devoted and deserving fans, collectively saving them £112 million per year. All profit made will also ethically return to the creatives who have earned it, nurturing the live events sector and enabling it to flourish with more shows, performances and gigs for all.
SOURCES
UK to outlaw reselling tickets for profit · News ⟋ RA
UK to ban the resale of tickets for profit to protect fans - The Daily Guardian
Putting fans first: consultation on the resale of live events tickets (HTML) - GOV.UK
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