The government has announced a number of proposals which it hopes will help overcome the growing trade of ticket touting. After that previously reported consultation with the live and ticket agency sectors, it says it hopes the measures will protect consumers eager to see live entertainments from having too great a dependency on over-priced tickets resold by third parties.
The measures aim to encourage the live and ticketing sectors to work together, on a voluntary basis, to combat touting - and especially the sale of tickets at hiked up prices on internet auction sites, often by individuals who bought the tickets specifically to sell on in that way. Among the measures is an industry wide ticket returns policy, a neutral website that allows fans to sell on unwanted tickets at face value, a kite mark system for ticket sales websites, and a code of practice for primary and secondary ticket sellers.
Commenting on the need to take action in this domain, the government's top culture bod Tessa Jowell told reporters: "The innocent victim of ticket touting is the fan who has to pay through the nose for a vastly overpriced ticket to see their sporting, stage or musical hero. These are the people we must protect."
No new laws will be introduced at this stage regarding ticket touts, although Jowell did not rule out the need to legislate at some point in the future to protect consumer interests. Assuming that the live sector would rather solve the touts problem itself without new government regulations being introduced, Jowell said: "The industry should consider itself on notice. If it hasn't come up with a workable solution to stamping out the most unscrupulous touts by next summer, where there is clear evidence it's needed, we may consider targeted action and changes in legislation to ensure genuine fans are protected from exploitation."
Given that no one really has a problem with traditional ticket touts, ie, the ones shouting "buying and selling" outside the venue on the night of a gig, and given that the recent closure of Getmetickets.net demonstrates that existing consumer protection laws will combat fully fledged online ticket operations that make false promises to punters, the biggest problem in the world of touting is presumably the ever growing number of people selling tickets via auction sites like eBay, and especially those people who buy tickets specifically to auction online. Whether the new measures will do anything to overcome that problem remains to be seen - but there remains some disagreement as to who is to blame for the emergence of that ticket auction marketplace.
Many in the live sector reckon the problem lies with eBay et al for allowing such auctions to be staged. Live Nation MD Stuart Galbraith told reporters yesterday that such eBay auctions were: "actually allowing people to buy tickets that they have no intention of using whatsoever, and making it more difficult for people who want to buy face value tickets in the first place. There are numerous examples of shows on eBay where people are being sold tickets when there are actually legitimate tickets, very available, in the marketplace at face value. And they are actually making people pay more then they should be."
But eBay, who reckon the vast majority of ticket sellers on their site are individuals genuinely looking to resell tickets for events they originally wished to attend, say that the fact there is a demand for tickets via auction sites, even at hiked up prices, shows that the live sector's own ticket sales systems aren't good enough. eBay's Richard Ambrose said that the live industry needs to take "a hard look at the way that they allocate tickets to sponsors and agencies, and at the way they price tickets to fill the house and maximise merchandise sales", adding that the existence of a secondary ticket market was down to "the shambolic way the live sector distributes tickets through jammed phone lines and crashing websites".