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Kid Rock not happy with the touts
By CMU Editorial | Published on Monday 6 December 2010
Kid Rock is not impressed that 45,000 tickets to his upcoming show in Detroit sold out in just 20 minutes. Why anger over a sell out? Because a big chunk of those tickets were snapped up by touts – or scalpers to use the American vernacular – and are now selling at huge mark-ups on all sorts of ticket resale websites.
He wrote on his website last week: “I am a musician. I did not attend college and barely made it out of high school. I try my hardest to keep my ticket prices low, THIS I HAVE CONTROL OF! I can not control, nor do I understand how the fuck the scalpers and all the secondary websites and bullshit get them. IF I COULD CONFRONT EACH AND EVERY ONE OF THEM FACE TO FACE I WOULD AND IT WOULD NOT WORK OUT TOO WELL FOR THEM I GUARANTEE ALL OF YOU. I hate them, I feel like someone is beating up a close friend or family member while I’m chained to a chair”.
He continued: “I try to understand it, I try to ask my managers and people in the business I know to help me understand it, but it seems they don’t either. The only way I know right now to stop it is [for you] to not buy from these people or wait til the last minute when there scared they cant sell em and have to sell them cheap. I am not gonna apologise for something I can’t control and if you wanna hate or blame me for it, go for it. But if you’re really pissed about it, research it and try to find out why it’s going on and let me know. A lot of us are trying to figure out a better way, trust me, the last thing I want is some bottom of the barrel lazy fuck who won’t get a real job ripping off my fans to get rich”.
Noting that he hadn’t consulted his management or PR people before publishing his rant on this issue (which, given all the spelling mistakes I just fixed, seems likely), he concluded: “This is right from my computer to yours. I hope it helps [you] to understand at least how I feel about people trying to get tickets in my fan club or any other way that turns out to be a let down, THAT IS NOT MY INTENTION OR WHY I GOT INTO MUSIC AT ALL. I will keep my mind spinning trying to figure out a better way to get good tickets to my true fans, and it brings to mind a new song on the new CD ‘the least that I can do is care’. Unfortunately that’s not gonna be enough in this case. Trust me I’m on top of this and doing what I can”.
All pretty reasonable stuff really, I think I’d be a bit pissed off in Mr Rock’s shoes. He should possibly look north for inspiration regarding tackling this issue. The Legislative Assembly of Ontario in Canada has just passed a new law making it illegal for primary ticketing agents to pass tickets on to a broker or secondary seller with whom they have some sort of affiliation.
The new rules are a result of the last time ticket touting was in the news in North America, when Ticketmaster was accused of misbehaving in the way its primary ticketing agency worked with the secondary ticketing website it had acquired, TicketsNow.
Ticketmaster has always denied allegations it actually transfers ownership of tickets from its main agency to its resale service itself, though it did in the past promote TicketsNow as an alternative source of tickets via its main website. That was a practice which pissed off Bruce Springsteen when he found out his fans in New Jersey were being directed to the more expensive resale site when the primary agency still actually had tickets to sell at face value. After Springsteen raged the New Jersey authorities introduced its own crack down on ticket resale service.
In Australia, however, the Commonwealth Consumers Affairs Advisory Council, which has been reviewing the growth of secondary ticketing, has advised that no new laws are required to crack down on ticket resales. Its report on the matter says that events sell out faster today than before not because touts are buying up increasing amounts of tickets, but because new technology allows tickets for in demand events to be sold to legitimate customers faster. It also suggests growing consumer frustration with touting is because, with the growth of ticket resale sites, people are now more aware of what is a long established phenomenon.
