Every cloud has a silver lining, so while it's very sad that Michael Jackson has died it's heartening to imagine the morning some ticket touts are having.
Like every other gig these days, many tickets for Jackson's string of O2 appearances have been snapped up by people trying to make a quick buck - and if they've bought on eBay and relisted them at an even higher price, they're about to take a financial kicking. We can barely type for grinning.
What's not so funny, though, is that lots of Jackson fans will have already bought their tickets from the touts - and unless the touts suddenly discover a heart of gold, which we very much doubt, that money's gone. If you buy your tickets from the box office (assuming you can get in before the resellers do) or pay through the nose at a legitimate reselling site, you'll get a refund - but if you buy tickets from less reputable sellers, such as shady agencies or individuals on eBay - you're almost certainly stuffed.
Concert tickets have become an elaborate mechanism for ripping off music fans. First of all, the promoter works out how much the gig will cost to stage, divides it by the number of tickets, and ends up with a cost per punter. He then takes that number, ignores it, thinks of the biggest number he can imagine and calls that the ticket price. The promoter then passes the tickets on to the ticket agency.
The ticket agency adds a few more zeroes, has a good laugh inventing spurious charges such as £300 for postage, and sells almost all of them to people who have no intention of going to the show.
Those people then do a funny thing. They take their tickets, double the face value, and list them on legitimate, "hey we're all music fans" resale sites - sites that, by a very happy coincidence, tend to be owned by the ticket agencies. When those tickets sell, the ticket agency gets another chunk of cash.
The thing is, those tickets still don't end up in your hands. Nope. Time and time again we've seen people buy them and list them on eBay, promising to send a copy of their email confirmation to the winning bidder. But the contract for those tickets is between the resale agency and the buyer, not between the agency and the buyer's buyer - so it's entirely up to the seller whether they refund your money or not.
The same applies to any ticket sold on eBay: if you spent the price of a really big house on tickets and the performer has a heart attack, do you honestly think you'll get your money back? As MusicAlly notes "Some sellers will have auctioned off tickets that they hadn't yet received, for hundreds of pounds each… Sellers will be refunded their initial £70+ ticket price by TicketMaster but will [they] refund the larger eBay amounts to their auction winners? Undoubtedly some will have spent the money and won't be in a position to pay back their buyers. Already we are hearing reports on Twitter of fans mourning up to £1,000 that they have spent on touted tickets."
We're not suggesting a footie-style ban on ticket reselling, but the insane cost of gigs is making a lot of people a lot of money at genuine fans' expense. We could solve it in seconds without hurting the fans that buy tickets and then discover they can't go: simply make it illegal to resell tickets at more than face value. Sure, it's meddling in the free market, but anybody who thinks the current situation is good for pop fans has clearly been drinking too much Jesus Juice.
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Your comments (5) Click to add a new comment
kasino72
June 29th
5. Signing up for the fanclub is an excellent idea. Any gig I've missed recently has been because I forgot to do just that.
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njp
June 27th
4. kasino72 - I take your point about tickets not being like eggs. What I meant is that the primary ticket sellers (Ticketmaster, See, Ticketweb...) are charging you a relatively low amount for the convenience of booking online. For many gigs, you can choose to queue at the box office instead and pay a lower booking fee, or none at all.
The secondary sellers *are* making a huge profit for doing very little, of course. However, despite the publicity when it happens, it's a relatively small number of tours that sell out within an hour, and even less where extra dates aren't subsequently added to cope with the demand.
with a few notable exceptions (I can only think of Michael Jackson this year), most fans could avoid the secondary market altogether if they bought tickets within a few days of the tour going on sale or waited to see if extra dates were announced. In fact, the secondary sellers sell thousands of expensive tickets every week for events that haven't even sold out on the Ticketmaster website,
My advice to fans would be to sign up for the online fan club for their favourite bands, and they may well be given the chance to buy tickets before they go on general sale. There are also some very good independent websites that will keep you up-to-date about what's going on sale when, and even send out email alerts before tickets go on sale.
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kasino72
June 27th
3. Hi NJP. I agree with you on promoters failing to break even further down the fame scale, but I'm not sure that tickets are like eggs. With other products and services you generally have a choice; with big gigs there tends to be an exclusive deal with a single agency, so you can't comparison shop. And with the economics of live music being what they are, there's no incentive for musicians to tour more.
If the tech market worked like the ticket market the iPhone would be twice as expensive as it already is, sold exclusively through O2, made in tiny numbers and on sale for exactly one hour. The majority of those phones would then end up on Apple-owned iPhone resale sites :)
The fundamental problem here is one of very limited supply and massive demand, and it's created a huge industry - I've seen estimates suggesting that resale is worth $20 to $40 billion a year in the US alone. That's a lot of money going to what are essentially quick-buck merchants. It's rather reminiscent of the "let's all become property developers!" thing that worked out so well lately, but with the estate agents keeping the profit... and because the ticket agencies profit from it, they have no incentive to do anything about touting. It's a completely distorted market.
> After all, concerts are luxuries that we can easily do without, unlike houses, for example.
True - but then again, estate agents don't market themselves as anti-establishment, art-not-money, we're-sticking-it-to-the-man types :)
My gut feeling is that ticket prices aren't going to come down (until careers fade: U2 still haven't sold out Glasgow, for example, even at lower ticket prices), but if we're going to pay silly money for tickets I'd much rather the money went to the artist than to a whole bunch of middlemen who don't actually do anything.
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achtungdave
June 26th
2. most secondary ticket sites in the small print they state they will only refund the face value of the ticket eeven if you paid £350 for a £75 ticket.
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njp
June 26th
1. Nobody likes to be ripped-off, but I think this is a rather simplistic view of what's happening in the live music industry.
It's certainly not unusual for promoters to fail to break even on a tour or festival, especially for less well-known artists, so it's hardly a case of "think of the biggest number he can imagine" for the ticket price. If anything, the fact that people are prepared to pay 2 or 3 times face value from a tout would indicate that the promoters have priced many tickets at far less than 'market value'.
The ticket agencies adding 10-20% to the ticket price and then charging again for P+P is no different to any retailer. You could probably buy eggs cheaper directly from the farmer, but most people choose to pay extra for the convenience of a local shop or supermarket instead. It's no different, expect that Tesco don't openly declare their profit margin.
If the artists really cared about ensuring their fans weren't "ripped off" by touts, the best thing they could do is arrange to play more gigs when tickets get close to selling out.
And as for banning the re-sale of tickets at above face value, I think there are other far more important markets where we should consider applying the rule first. After all, concerts are luxuries that we can easily do without, unlike houses, for example.
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