Business News Deals Digital Live Business Top Stories

See Tickets among ticketing platforms to sign up to FanFair’s anti-tout declaration

By | Published on Monday 19 December 2016

FanFair

The FanFair Alliance has announced that four more ticketing platforms have signed up to its declaration against online ticket touts, including Vivendi’s See Tickets.

As much previously reported, FanFair, launched earlier this year, is campaigning to slow the flood of tickets that flow from the primary ticketing sites onto the secondary market, while seeking extra regulation of the touting business.

The UK-based campaign has been leading the charge to get a specific touting bots ban added to the Digital Economy Bill that is working it’s way through Parliament. But it has also been calling on people within the music industry to do their bit to ensure more tickets to in-demand events are sold directly to fans, and that when tickets are resold, they are sold on at face value, or near enough.

A key part of that is the FanFair Declaration which “asks that supporters take five actions to ensure face value tickets reach fans, as well as measures to disrupt the practices of online ticket touts”. Managers, agents, promoters, trade groups and ticketing platforms are amongst those to have already signed up to the declaration.

The latest signatories also include Skiddle, The Ticket Factory and Gigantic, the latter of which recently announced a tie-up with Twickets, which helps individuals looking to resell tickets for events they can no longer attend at face value. The four new signees join rival ticketing platforms Songkick, Dice, Music Glue, Active Ticketing, Billetto, Pledge, Scarlet Mist, WeGotTickets and the aforementioned Twickets in backing the declaration.

Confirming all this, FanFair Campaign Manager Adam Webb told reporters: “There is a clear trend emerging between those who want to tackle industrial-scale touting and those who profit from it, and we are delighted that Gigantic, See Tickets, Skiddle and The Ticket Factory have signed the FanFair Declaration. We will be encouraging more to come on board in 2017. Working together, and with the right political support, our goal is to help recalibrate the ticketing market to make it fairer and more transparent to fans”.

Back in Westminster, with momentum gathering for the ban on the bots used by touts to access large quantities of tickets off the primary sites, FanFair is also calling on the government to enact other recommendations contained within Professor Michael Waterson’s review of the secondary ticketing market, which was instigated by the 2015 Consumer Rights Act and published earlier this year.

Premium CMU subscribers can catch up on all the many recent developments in the secondary ticketing debate via the latest CMU Trends article.



READ MORE ABOUT: | | | |