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Ticketmaster switches on price-capped resale on its primary site
By Chris Cooke | Published on Monday 10 December 2018
Ticketmaster UK has put live the previously promised price-capped resale function within its main ticketing platform, with the Live Nation company’s standalone secondary ticketing websites in Europe – Seatwave and Get Me In! – now officially no more.
“Fans simply hit ‘sell’ on the tickets they can no longer use, and they’ll be put in front of millions of others to buy and go to the show in their place”, the company exclaimed on Friday, while explaining how the new resale functionality works. “When tickets are resold, we’ll cancel them and send new, unique ones to the fan who has bought them. That ensures that all tickets on Ticketmaster are 100% verified and fans will have no concerns about getting in at the door”.
Ticketmaster Europe confirmed in August that it was bailing on more traditional ticket resale, where resellers can charge whatever price they like on any tickets they are reselling. The company said at the time that no new ticket listings would be taken by either Seatwave or Get Me In! and that both sites would subsequently go offline.
That announcement was widely welcomed by the music community, and especially those artists, managers, agents and promoters who have become increasingly vocal in recent years in their criticism of online touting. It also meant the live music giant no longer had to sit on the opposite side of the table from its colleagues in the music industry whenever ticket resale is discussed.
The new resale functionality within the main Ticketmaster site is similar to tools added by a number of other primary ticketing platforms in recent years. By making it easier for customers to sell on tickets they can no longer use, the primary sites remove a common excuse employed by the likes of StubHub and Viagogo (and previously Seatwave and Get Me In!), ie that they need to exist to help fans who have a change of plan get their money back, even if most of the tickets on those platforms are being sold by industrial-level touts.
A number of other new functions were added to the Ticketmaster UK platform on Friday. “Want to transfer tickets to friends?”, the company’s blog post went on, “with just one click fans now can. If fans have bought digital tickets they can download them straight onto their mobile and transfer them over”.
The ticketing firm concluded: “Everything we do is about making the fan experience better. These changes have been designed and built to make it easier for fans to get into the shows they love”.
Although no longer in the secondary ticketing game proper in Europe, Ticketmaster still provides services and platforms for touts in the US. Though that too has proven controversial of late, with the ticketing business fighting class action lawsuits that allege its primary business acts illegally to boost the resale business. Live Nation denies those allegations and recently tried to have the lawsuits dismissed on a terms and conditions technicality.
