The deadline for submissions to the UK government’s consultation on secondary ticketing was earlier this month. In the twelve weeks that ministers were accepting submissions, one of the biggest ticket resale platforms, good old Viagogo, continued to “engage in misleading and potentially unlawful practices”, according to a leading pressure group.
“Viagogo's belligerent disregard for UK audiences never ceases to surprise”, says Adam Webb, Campaign Manager at the FanFair Alliance, which has long campaigned against for-profit ticket touting.
But, he adds, for Viagogo “to continue promoting such exploitative and unlawful practices during the consultation period really takes the biscuit”. That ongoing activity, set out in FanFair’s own submission to the consultation, “reiterates why we urgently need a price cap to stop this ongoing exploitation of fans, and to allow a fair and consumer-friendly model of ticket resale to flourish”, Webb adds.
Sharon Hodgson MP, also a long-time campaigner against for-profit ticket touting, has responded to FanFair’s submission and the Viagogo conduct it outlines. “These new findings are outrageous but completely unsurprising”, she says, adding “fans, artists, athletes and venues deserve better!”
Jon Collins, CEO of live industry trade group LIVE, adds that FanFair’s findings “highlight the blight of ticket touts on the live music sector” and “reinforce the pressing need for swift government action”.
By government action, Collins mainly means the ticket touting price cap which, he says, will be popular with “industry and public alike”, citing research commissioned by LIVE last month in which only 12% of those surveyed were against the price cap proposal.
The Labour Party committed to introduce a price cap on ticket resale in the UK ahead of last year’s General Election. It would mean anyone reselling tickets on platforms like Viagogo, including commercial touts, would only be able to increase the price of any one ticket by a set amount from what they paid when buying it from a primary seller.
Labour initially suggested a 10% price cap. It then opened its consultation asking for input from the live and ticketing sectors regarding how the price cap might work.
The call for submissions referenced a possible price cap from 0% to 30%. There has also been much debate as to whether the price cap applies to the face value of the ticket or the total price paid to the primary seller, including its fees. And also whether the price cap should include the additional fees charged by the likes of Viagogo.
FanFair has long campaigned for stronger regulation of the secondary ticketing market, initially pushing for more transparency and restrictions, before ultimately advocating for the outright ban of for-profit touting. Since Labour proposed the price cap, FanFair has come out in support of that proposal.
Secondary ticketing has long been controversial of course and Viagogo has been a particularly controversial player in the market. Last year FanFair shared a study with CMU showing that a small number of industrial level touts were speculatively listing thousands of tickets on Viagogo, despite the resale platform in theory prohibiting speculative selling, where touts list tickets they are yet to secure.
There was more speculative selling on Viagogo while the government’s consultation was open, according to new data from FanFair. That includes “listing tickets for Bastille’s UK arena shows a day before tickets were publicly available - and promoting those listings via sponsored Google posts”, and “allowing a group of overseas traders to ‘resell’ tickets for artists including Central Cee - despite those same tickets still being listed as unsold on Ticketmaster”.
FanFair also says that Viagogo broke existing consumer rights laws by “permitting professional touts to list tickets with non-existent seat numbers, non-existent row numbers and wildly incorrect face values”, while also linking from advertorial on UK websites to an international version of Viagogo which “unlawfully engages in drip pricing”, where fees are added to the total price of a ticket later on in the transaction.
Annabella Coldrick, CEO of the UK’s Music Managers Forum, has also commented on the FanFair submission which, she says, contains “really damning evidence” against Viagogo. She adds, “I’m sure the government will share our outrage at how these offshore resale platforms continue to exploit and rip off British gig-goers. It was MMF members who established the FanFair campaign in 2016, and we believe that a price cap on ticket resale is the only way to end these abuses”.