Are you unhappy with ticket resale websites?

Also blame the people who pay extortionate prices to the resellers. If they did not buy the tickets the market would collapse.

At one time, medical treatment could be more dangerous than illness but we found a better way rather than accepting the status quo. I think we should run our country for the benefit of people rather than to support greed.

Why cannot we legislate to ban tickets being resold by companies at high prices?

Then you raise the question of how do you set a fair price in the first place. In popular music and football events for example you could argue we pay an extortionate amount of money to the performers and, as a consequence, price many people out of seeing a live event. Is this exploitation by the participants and promoters? I think it is. Touts add another layer of exploitation. It has been said that the value of anything is what people are prepared to pay for it. It happens everywhere – lawyers, CEOs, entertainers, artists – just where do you attempt to draw a line in this rocky road?

I agree that we live in a world of exploitation, but in the case of resale of tickets we could cap resale price by legislation. That would not prevent individuals selling tickets at an inflated price but it would get rid of those organisations that are exploiting the public by buying tickets in bulk and selling them on at high prices. We would not be having this discussion if there was not considerable public concern.

I have been to many concerts in my time but cannot recall paying more than the ticket price plus the handling charge to have tickets posted. Needless to say I have not been to a pop concert or a sports fixture. 🙂

Malcolm R wrote “you could argue we pay an extortionate amount of money to the performers and, as a consequence, price many people out of seeing a live event.”

It’s not just attending a live event, but as someone on radio today pointed out, the rights to broadcast events (particularly sport) have been a massive auction where some media concern (Sky, BBC, BT, ITV) may pay a massive price, and thus restrict (in the case of Sky/ BT) who can watch. It’s probably more to do with the promoters than the individual sports men/women, though for music events, it may be the artists, because they are having so much sliced off their income by middle men, record labels, etc, that they now find they must play live to earn income without the hangers-on taking a cut.

And as a follow up to post my son is a british soldier in the welsh guards .. Should we not be more worried about our own soldiers getting beheaded on our streets than someone making a profit on a ticket WTF is this country coming to .. Our priorities are all wrong ..

To be frank, I’d prefer it if she and her friends all didn’t go, but complained to the promoters if they came across rip-off priced tickets being available. As for “no one holds a gun to their head”, I think that’s an inflammatory statement, perhaps a result of other concerns in your life, ie your son.

No, I doubt we are “more” worried about ridiculous prices for tickets for sports and music events than the risk to any one of us in the UK, but for the most part, we can do something about the rip-off prices, and we have to hope that the security services learn of any intentions of the latter type concern. In reality, and looking objectively, what one of these is more likely – someone being ripped off for a ticket (or like me, deciding to simply boycott the majority of events as they are a luxury I cannot afford and will not pay silly prices), or the (in my view, one in several million) chance of being attacked in the way you describe.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not dismissing the possibility nor making light of it, but on the plain mathematics and probability, ticket prices are likely to affect the majority and a beheading (or even assault) will be millions of times less likely.

Violenece of any type is a concern, but you have to consider the day-to-day situation of the majority, not the lower possibilities of threat to minorities, and the extremely unlikely situation you brought up in your late evening post..

I too was in the forces but I think that is not the issue here. It is immoral that Ticketmaster makes a lot of commission by not only allowing touts on their secondary sites such as get me in or seat wave, but actively encourage it. We have different priorities in our country. I have full respect for your son but at the same time I have total disrespect for ticket companies that allow this rip off to go on. If somebody genuinely cannot attend after buying a ticket, then they should be able to offer it for sale to someone else at face value. It should be made illegal for secondary sites to sell them for anything more.

Spot on mate. I’ve actually ppl message me to buy good seats for them rather than not see the act. How many these cries don’t want to rise for 9am then expect good seats when they get the notion

The key issue is probbaly not what individuals do with tickets they wish to sell on, but the industrial scale of the reselling that takes place immediately after the tickets have been released for sale. It is clear that other companies, sometimes from the same stable, have acquired a pre-emption right in a closed market [no doubt for payment] for large quantities of tickets which they in turn put on sale in the open market at inflated prices. To some extent this is commercial hedging by the primary ticket seller [it spreads the risk if the event goes pear-shaped for some reason] but the premiums payable for the tickets on secondary release are exorbitant, exploitative, and extortionate. Between the artistes and their fans there are a huge number of parasitic intermediaries and I don’t think any of them have clean hands since it pays them to keep the ball rolling.

For an update, see the Conversation called “Is buying second-hand tickets about to get better?” [6 March 2015] – for some reason it doesn’t appear in the index under “ticket reselling” and has only attracted one comment.

I should add that the latest Conversation I referred to above can be accessed quickly by clicking on the “festival tickets” tag shown at the foot of the intro to this Conversation.

It would be a real help to have links to newer Conversations on similar topics added at the end of of the introduction. It’s great to flag up the new discussions as you both have done, but these comments can soon get lost, particularly with Convos that run for many pages.

I agree – I think that might already be in the pipeline of possible improvements to this website. In the meantim, I don’t mind doing a little bit of cross-referencing but it would be much better done systematically. Perhaps the authors of the topics don’t have any responsibility for continuity. Andrew and Patrick are the exceptions that prove the rule.

One answer to these resale sites is for people to stop buying from them. Unfortunately they seem to prosper because many people appear prepared to spend large sums of money on entertainment.

Tim , in the USA there are laws regarding this – State Consumers Laws – Unfair Competition Law and Federal Banking Laws . This country ? -VAT Agents and , at present the Guardian is suing online ad tech firm Rubicon Project on the grounds of “undisclosed fees ” at this present moment -20-3-2017- Mobile Marketing/ Business Insider , you have to read the defence put up , its on a Philadelphia Lawyer level , very tricky . Unless somebody has a UK legal definitive court ruling on this issue then its certainly a Grey area of law in this country.