Ticket resale prices for live UK events to be capped in crackdown on touts
Viagogo and StubHub platforms to be hit by cap of face value plus 30% or less
The price of something simply is the price of something. Limiting the cash price just moves that price to some other aspect. Contacts, queues, uncertainty, summat else.
Prices are prices.
What the govt needs to clamp down on are rugby clubs selling their ticket allocations for Test Matches to the hospitality industry.
I’m getting old, so I have no burning desire to pay thousands to see some slapper in saggy tights lip sync to her latest album.
I enjoyed my trip to see Sigourney Weaver at Christmas though. She makes a great Widow Twanky.
I wonder quite often where the Schools for Lefties are and how they’re camouflaged. There must be somewhere that combines medical facilities and schools such that trainees can have sections of their brains removed and the remnants indoctrinated to facilitate stupidity while retaining the ability to breathe…
Give it a year and there’ll be an inquiry into why the face value of tickets has gone up so much.
Excellent news for scousers who can now dust off their shell suits and stand outside gigs buying and selling tickets for whatever people are willing to pay
“ Limiting the cash price just moves that price to some other aspect. Contacts, queues, uncertainty, summat else.”
So good for politicians if tickets will in future be allocated by contacts & influence.
Funny how that problem has already been solved…
All festivals I work at or go to have ElectronicTickets, which can only be resold ( or rather returned ) through the website of the organiser, or the ticket agency they employ if they don’t want to handle that particular load of Admin.
It’s amazing how well that works, and how tricky it is to actually circumvent it.
I’m afraid the shell-suited Scousers’ days may be numbered. The last gig I went to was ticketed entirely through an app called Dice with the tickets logged to the phone number, account, etc. etc. I fail to see how you could tout this.
Fun gig, in memoriam of sadly deceased ace session bass player Mo Foster. Saw plenty of old mates there.
Grikath, but they sure as hell recoup their costs in outrageous ‘admin’ and ‘booking’ fees.
These scousers surely have ways. The last ticket I sold to a tout outside was a Glastonbury ticket which have the ticket holders photo on. This one, a friends who couldn’t come, a mixed race girl early 20s. The scouser paid nearly face value and the chances are low of finding a buyer fitting roughly that description that has made their way to Glastonbury on the off chance of getting a ticket, so he must have altered the ticket to fit whoever bought it
“No, that really is me. I was on my way to a party hosted by Justin Trudeau, so I thought I’d better black up”
Norman said:
“The last gig I went to was ticketed entirely through an app called Dice with the tickets logged to the phone number, account, etc. etc. I fail to see how you could tout this.”
If there’s enough money to be made reselling, it would be worth buying a sim and setting up an account.
Ottokring
No offense, but I disagree. No matter how annoying – and I agree it really must be – Gov’t has absolutely no business interfering in the decisions of independent actors like the RFU and corporate buyers. There really is no bad arrangement Gov’t can’t make worse.
– What the govt needs to clamp down on are rugby clubs selling their ticket allocations for Test Matches to the hospitality industry.
This seems like something that can remain safely outside the remit of government.
It was literally a squirrel that distracted me between type and post.
Ironman
My tongue was in my cheek when I wrote that.
But
It is a good example of ‘legitimate’ touting. The club’s make a few bob out of it, which is fine, but it falls within the definition.
I DO wisht the sodding spell checker would stop adding grocer’s apostrophes to my plurals !
@ Bloke in Powys Dunno about “outrageous” .
There is no doubt there’s outfits trying to fleece for every penny they can get away with, especially the big, traditional ticketing agencies.
Which is why Startups in that business happen, and those do have their own Habitat.
Still, to make those systems work you need some serious Cloud clout with privacy/security features, a fair stack of actual hardware (preferably hardened against Tampering, for scanning onsite plus the proper software, development and maintenance of said software, arrangements for *proper* broadband onsite ( which is not always a given) to handle the datastream, people to Man the Stations, and do the Office Work.
Y’know… Stuff…
Which needs to be paid out of those handling and processing fees. Because the actual margins on the tickets themself ain’t all that much.
“Highly Automated” does not equate to “Negligible Cost of Operation” . Something a lot of people tend to forget when it suits them.
Do you think popular events, or even west end shows that are put on hundreds of times a year, always sell out within seconds of going on sale because the people who want to go to them are waiting by their computers for sales to open so that literally no one can attend any of them without buying grey market tickets from a semi-legal tout?
Did Iron Maiden really sell out every stadium in Germany for this year’s tour within 15 minutes of opening sales?
Am I asking a lot of rhetorical questions today?
Or are there two or three large ticket sellers doing this all with software developed for automated trading? In some cases even scalping their own tickets?
I was quite impressed with the Ticketmaster resale system last year. I managed to get 4 tickets to Billy Joel at Cardiff last August, but due to an unfortunate sequence of events I and my friends were unable to go. So I sold the tickets through Ticketmaster’s resale system (which is only for tickets they’ve sold). You can’t ask for more than face value, but you can choose the pricing below that. I sold 3 at face value easily, but had one left that hung around, so as the day approached kept reducing it and it sold as well.
I stopped going to Glastonbury when Mean Fiddler got involved and the super fence went up. Half of the fun was travelling hundreds of miles and finding ways of getting in for next to nowt
Ottokring,
“I’m getting old, so I have no burning desire to pay thousands to see some slapper in saggy tights lip sync to her latest album.”
It wasn’t age that got me out of big gigs, it was realising that they were pretty shit. Pay a ton of money, then spend hours getting to the gig, loads of time in and out, absolutely fleeced on food and drink, and then you’re half a mile from the stage.
I swear, everyone lies about how good a time they had, and just goes so they can snap shots for their instagram to show off. My favourite gigs in recent years were in places like Bath Forum. £35 a ticket, in and out in 5 minutes, band without spitting distance.
“It wasn’t age that got me out of big gigs, it was realising that they were pretty shit. Pay a ton of money, then spend hours getting to the gig, loads of time in and out, absolutely fleeced on food and drink, and then you’re half a mile from the stage.”
Years ago when the Stone Roses reformed, as a fan who had found the SR after they’d already split up, I really really wanted to go to one of the Heaton Park gigs. I went online, all the normally priced tickets went in 2 seconds flat. All that was left were the hospitality tickets. Faced with either paying up or not going, I paid up. Cost me £400/ticket. Turned out to be the best money I’d ever spent. It got me into a private area with some free food and drink, and plenty more to be purchased, seating so we could sit and chill while waiting for the gig to start, and most importantly a wrist band that allowed me into the fenced off area right in front of the stage. I watched the entire gig leaning back on the dividing fence, about 50 yards from the stage. At one point I turned around and looked into the distance at a sea of bodies crammed in tightly together. The people at the back must have struggled to see the big screen, let alone the stage. One of the best gigs of my life.
This was about my view:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2DzivvrxrI
Long ago, my city tried something similar with scalping prices.
So I had to buy a $200 Led Zep tee-shirt, and they nicely threw in a concert ticket.
Ingenuity always wins.
@Western Bloke
“and then you’re half a mile from the stage” – I saw Pink Floyd at Wembley in 89, about 130 yds from the stage. It was exactly what I wanted, smoking a spliff, didn’t want to see them up close and sweaty, they’re half man half god and to be enjoyed from far away.
Found out years later that Roger Waters was abusing us all from behind the wall, it only made it better! Pink Floyd is all about “English melancholia” (Melvin Bragg) and Roger giving us the v from behind the wall, telling us all how shit it is and how shit we are and how shit and ungrateful he is was just about perfect.
Poor old Roger Waters I say.
might have been 1990. Stoned, difficult to place it exactly.
Saw the Rolling Stones at same venue that same summer. Jagger once boasted that he had the best rock n roll band in the world, which coming from that smug git is highly irritating, but what really sticks in my craw is that he was right.
BTW, in a big venue like Wembley Floyd much better than Stones, though I reckon Rolling Stones would probably be awesome in a small venue where you really can see them sweating, and Pink Floyd would perhaps not make much sense.
How do they do it with airline tickets? I don’t see people hanging around outside the airport saying “wanna go to Munich mate?”
jgh,
For one thing, passengers are named and there’s a big transfer fee and they can practically check ID.
But from what I understand of hotels, they initially set prices based on expected demand (e.g. lower prices at weekends, raise the price for Edinburgh festival) but have an algorithm based on rooms remaining, time remaining and price. If everyone’s snapping them up faster than expected, it means you’ve underpriced it, raise the prices. If there’s rooms sitting there not selling, lower the price to sell them.
So there’s little opportunity to buy up a load of rooms quickly because the price then gets corrected because of the rate of buying.