The chairman elect of the much previously reported Resale Rights Society, an artist management founded body that seeks to regulate the resale of tickets by touts online, and the websites that facilitate the sales, told the previously reported MusicTank debate on the issue that ticket resale sites were at risk of doing to live music what download sites like iTunes did to recorded music - ie taking pricing control out of the hands of the people who actually make the music.
According to Billboard, RRS man Marc Marot, also an artist manager with Terra Firma Management, warned that: "Live music is having a fecund time now. But that's how the record companies felt around 1998; they could not see the technology revolution coming. If we don't get our act together, we're going to be in deep trouble too". As previously reported, RRS is offering to give so called secondary ticketing websites official approval in return for a commitment to pass a cut of their profits back to artists and gig promoters.
But the boss of one of those sites, Viagogo's Eric Baker, called Marot's comparison flawed, observing: "The reason why live music is prospering is that you can't pirate a live event; you're either there or you're not. The tickets have already been paid for; so the primary people, the artists, have already been paid. Therefore, the analogy is misguided". Baker maintains that because artists and promoters receive their pay from the face value price of the ticket, it is unfair for those people to then expect an additional cut from any mark up earned by a seller on his website.
Some in the live music industry have in the past said the solution to secondary ticketing is to look to government to ban it, and while the Concert Promoters Association recently gave its support to the RSS proposal, the National Arenas Association said in a statement provided to the Think Tank that they still oppose the resale websites, arguing that they provide a front for serial ticket touts who are "steeped in fraud" and linked to "organised crime". But Carl Leighton-Pope of talent agency Leighton-Pope Organisation said he thought the live sector needed to find a way to work with rather than try to quash the ticket resale sector, telling the MusicTank audience: "Now that secondary ticketing is here we have to embrace it. Nobody is going to be able to do anything about it, especially if the public wants it".
Marot admitted that the RSS model still needed some work to address the concerns of all players in the live music industry, and the whole thing has clearly got some way to go before getting the support of the Viagogos of this world. Whether the Think Tank helped move things forward in anyway I don't know, but the heated debate and opposing views on show there certainly showed that this is and will remain a hot topic.