Ticket scalpers make money
Resale sites are dominated by touts who buy thousands of tickets and sell them on at exorbitant prices. Can the trade be stopped? Rob Davies and Rupert Jones. Sunday 15 May W hen David Bennett, a passionate music fan, moved to London at the age of 25, he was desperate for any kind of break in the entertainment industry. So when a job came up with a secondary ticketing website — an online marketplace that matches fans selling gig tickets with buyers — he took it.
A few years later he had quit, disillusioned and appalled by an enterprise that lined the pockets of touts at the expense of fans. He handed in his notice shortly afterwards. Welcome to the world of ticket touting in the UK. For as long as there have been ticketed events, there have been people trading on the fact that demand for live sports or music events outstrips supply.
But the advent of the internet put rocket boosters under the trade. The armchair army will now be gearing up for the annual bonanza that is the British summer. The mark-ups can be eye-watering.
Within seconds of an event going on sale, the tickets are harvested in their thousands by a small but ruthlessly efficient army of touts, many using multiple credit cards to bypass the limit on the number of tickets that one person can purchase.
They make their profit by flipping the tickets they secure on to the secondary ticketing sites. Although secondary tickets are often advertised at a huge mark-up, there are usually enough devoted fans willing to pay what it takes to be there. Even more egregiously, secondary sites Get Me In and Seatwave are both owned by Ticketmaster, which ends up getting paid twice over.
Everybody wins, except for the fans. The Observer spoke to one seasoned tout, who has built a business worth hundreds of thousands of pounds, thanks to the secondary ticketing world. Speaking on condition of anonymity, he said that the use of multiple identities and credit cards — to circumvent limits on the number of tickets one person can buy — is commonplace.
Savvy touts, he said, will pay to join fan clubs in the knowledge that bands sometimes release tickets early to their most devoted followers. Even if they have to pay a subscription fee, the profit margin on the ticket easily covers the cost. A few key players appear to play a pivotal role in the secondary ticketing game. Another big player is Norfolk-based Maria Chenery-Woods, owner of Ticket Queen.
Asked how they got their tickets, one such individual simply said: Whatever one makes of the morality of the ticketing money-go-round, some experts believe that the rules and regulations governing the system are routinely flouted. Anyone masquerading as different people to get hold of multiple tickets for the purposes of a sale risks breaching these regulations, he says.
As for selling the tickets on, the Consumer Contracts regulations say that any trader using online secondary ticketing platforms should provide their identity and their address or contact details.
But punters will struggle to find an event on one of the secondary ticketing websites with information about who the seller is.
Last year measures were included in the Consumer Rights Act that require anyone who resells an event ticket via a secondary market website to provide details of the seat row and number, as well as the face value. Critics say that the secondary sites are routinely ignoring this requirement, too. In November consumer group Which?
Often there is very little information provided about where someone who buys a ticket will end up sitting. Campaigners say such information would make it easier to cross-check whether tickets were being sold by genuine fans or touts in it for the money.
These regulations are supposed to be enforced by local authorities, but with central government cuts biting they lack the resources to police the existing law. It is not in the interests of resale websites, which make commission on every ticket sold, to crack down on touts who flout the law. And the touts themselves certainly have no interest in derailing the gravy train. Another tout, who declined to give his name, said: But what does taking the moral high ground mean for touts?
One measure of the power that touts wield is the extent to which they are not just tolerated by secondary websites but courted by them. Unlike Ticketmaster, which can boost secondary sales on Get Me In and Seatwave by redirecting fans to those sites, StubHub needed the touts on board — after all, they had the tickets.
I would say that the secondary market, and especially touting, is a parasitical business. The ticket sites have developed sophisticated lobbying efforts to support their opposition to any measures that might curb touting. Fan Freedom UK is a website that casts itself as a grassroots organisation for fans, battling against plans that might prevent ordinary people from selling on their tickets. Only a prolonged look through its US parent website reveals the truth of who is behind it: So why, with all this apparent evidence of dubious practices, is the government not doing more to crack down on ticket touting via resale sites?
One of the reasons is that not all MPs are as anti-secondary ticketing as Hodgson. One of the arguments deployed by Davies is that curbing ticket resales would disadvantage the ordinary fan who simply wants to recoup money for a ticket he or she can no longer use. But according to Reg Walker, legitimate resellers are very much in the minority on the major websites.
The overwhelming majority of tickets on resale platforms are being sold by traders. Last October the government launched a long-awaited review of how the secondary ticket market was working, and whether consumers were sufficiently protected by the new rules. The review panel, chaired by Professor Michael Waterson, is due to release its findings in the next 10 days. A number of politicians and music industry representatives are calling on the government to enforce the provision already made in the Consumer Rights Act and, ideally, go further by requiring ticket resellers to reveal their identities.
There are also now alternatives emerging to the secondary sites such as mobile ticket exchange app Twickets, which allows fans to offer tickets at face value or below for events they can no longer attend. Its founder, Richard Davies, is fed up with the greed of touts impinging on the rights of music and sports fans, and rejects the notion that touting is simply the free market in action.
Those selling through these channels are regularly breaking the law and the platforms themselves do very little about it.
Ticketmaster failed to answer when asked to respond to this article, and StubHub declined to comment. Before and after… what they cost when they first go on sale and what they cost when they land on secondary sites. ADELE O2, London, 21 March Face value: RICHARD ASHCROFT Albert Hall, Manchester, 14 May Face value: DAVID BOWIE PROM Royal Albert Hall, London, 29 July Face value: Please choose your username under which you would like all your comments to show up.
You can only set your username once. International edition switch to the UK edition switch to the US edition switch to the Australia edition. The Guardian - Back to home. So why is it that touts are able to sell gig tickets at such exorbitant prices?
Gone in 20 minutes: Radiohead tickets for the Roundhouse, an impossible mission.
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Threads collapsed expanded unthreaded. Loading comments… Trouble loading? Signed in as Show comment Hide comment. Your comments are currently being pre-moderated why? Please keep comments respectful and abide by the community guidelines. Ticketmaster accused of not doing enough to thwart touts. Company says it tries to stop people bulk-buying tickets for resale at a mark-up but fans group questions its commitment.
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