Buying tickets? Well the days of waiting outside box offices or dispatching self-addressed envelopes are long gone. Adam Webb, of FanFair Alliance, joins us as a guest to explain why things haven’t necessarily changed for the good.
These days, tickets for gigs and festivals are mostly purchased at the click of a button, and increasingly via a mobile phone.
However, for the most in-demand events, things are often not quite so simple.
Ticket touts
At these shows, genuine fans face unfair competition from online touts who have the capability to hoover up significant volumes of tickets.
Combined with a ready-made ‘secondary’ marketplace, where tickets can be resold anonymously on platforms like Viagogo, StubHub, Get Me In! and Seatwave, then an already scarce supply is rendered scarcer.
Such is the scale of the ‘secondary’ business, that we frequently see thousands of tickets for the most popular shows listed on these sites before they have officially gone on sale.
The resale sites also carry considerable marketing weight and dominate search engine results, systematically directing would-be buyers towards touts operating on the secondary market – even when face value tickets are still available.
Seeking a solution
FanFair Alliance has received hundreds of complaints from members of the public who have mistakenly purchased a ‘resold’ ticket in the belief they were buying from a legitimate seller. As a result, back in March we published an online guide for audiences offering ten tips to beat the touts when buying music tickets online.
Many artists and their teams are fighting back too – taking preemptive measures to curb this industrial-scale rip off, and offering the facilities for genuinely unwanted tickets be resold at face value.
Ticket resales
This is something FanFair wholeheartedly endorses as we campaign for a transparent and properly functioning resale market.
And it’s also why we’re supporting Which? in its work around raising awareness to the problems with ticket resale sites and gathering case study experiences of those using ticket resale platforms.
So if you’ve recently bought tickets on platforms like Viagogo, StubHub, Get Me In! and Seatwave then please take five minutes to share your experience with Which?.
This is a guest contribution by Adam Webb of FanFair. All views expressed here are Adam’s own and not necessarily those also shared Which?.
So what have you bought resale tickets for an event before? What was your experience like?
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