The day arrives. It’s time to buy tickets to see your favourite artist, you virtually queue for hours to get to the front and the virtual box office shutters are slammed in your face. SOLD OUT! What do you do? You just have to go to this gig! Resale ticket site it is but at 300% it’s original value?! Are you insane?
According to Viagogo boss Cris Miller “Fan actually prefer buying from Viagogo instead of direct.” in an interview with the BBC. Somehow, I don’t think he is currently on this planet.
Let’s Make This Swift
Love her or hate her, Taylor Swift is one of the biggest superstars on the planet right now. Her album Midnights went on sale in October 2022 but if you pre-ordered you got a code to have access to a presale gig access code. Taylor went on socials in June to announce her ERA’s tour was coming to Europe with 10 dates in the UK. Due to popular demand, another 3 dates were added. To avoid a Tickermaster meltdown (which happened in the US last year), pre-sale tickets and general sale tickets have been staggered but it has still caused controversy.
Within an hour of the first batch of pre-sale tickets going on sale, numerous amounts of tickets appeared on resale site Viagogo and StubHub. Some tickets start at £319 going as high as £2,000 and even more! This was a complaint, as well as Ticketmaster melting down, made by Swifts (Taylor Swift fans) back in November 2022 and they even took their complaint to the US Senate who did promptly investigate. One question brought to the table was that do Ticketmaster and Live Nation (who combined forces in 2010) have the majority when it comes to event ticketing selling? By joining forces, they essentially eliminated any chance of competition so could effectively charge what they want. In turn, this then allows resale to charge what they want for tickets being sold on their sites.
You run the risk of being overcharged (ever so slightly…not) when purchasing from reselling sites but also having your ticket rejected at an event. Back in 2018, Ed Sheeran famously told fans they would be refused entry to his gigs if they purchased from a secondary site and didn’t have valid I.D that matched the ticket. This was part of a ticket touting boycott and standing against ticket inflation. Which is another thing altogether.
How Can You Defend It?
In an interview with BBC 4’s You and Yours Programme, Cris Miller said “people would absolutely buy a ticket and not want to go or resell it without being driven by profit”, not the right-minded people anyways. He continued to defend the company saying, “it may not be for everybody” and was not going to apologise for the service that they provided.
If you want to listen to the full interview, click the link here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001np5n
We’re very very confident in it and been doing it for 20 years now.
Cris Miller talking to the BBC
Personally, I do not understand it. There has never been a band or an event that would drive me to spend over 3 times the amount of an original ticket, let alone max out my credit card or go into my overdraft by £5,000!
It is pure greed from these companies, not just the reselling sites but also Ticketmaster. They have everyone by the throat being the company that most artists use to sell their events, some bands including The Cure have tried to boycott them. Cris also in another interview tried to say that before Viagogo launched, the UK ticket reselling market was “catastrophic”, and was risking the public taking chances with scammers.
Not going to lie, that still happens no matter what, scamming people is a practice as old as time itself. So, if Mr Miller thinks Viagogo has come along to be our saving grace, he’s can think again!
What are we to do?
The music industry sadly has a lot of issues which maybe were not as big pre-covid, but it has certainly shined the light on a lot of ugly issues. I think that due to everyone being cooped up for almost two years with no events going on, Joe and Joanne Public are almost willing to pay anything to see an artist perform.
Let’s be honest, quite a few artists have announced retirements in the past couple of years so of course people will want to get their hands on that sort after tickets. At the same time, it has opened the ugly gateway for scammers, fraudsters, and reselling sites to take liberties with people’s vulnerabilities especially FOMO.
Check out my previous article about ticket scammers winning at life.
To deal with this issue, the UK government isn’t really fussed. Understandably they have bigger issues going on but at the same time, it is killing the industry and is harmful to the economy. At least in the US, they have been investigating “Dynamic Pricing” and how resellers can inflate prices to extortionate levels. Viagogo has been fined in other countries around the world for their policies.
A few countries in the world have strict laws in regards to reselling and touting. As recent as last month, Viagogo was fined €23.5million for breaking anti-touting laws in Italy, which was the second time, they were fined back in 2020 for the same thing, just €3.7million that time.
Australia took on Viagogo and fined the company $7million. If other countries can take on reselling sites and make them remove illegal content then why can’t the UK?
This isn’t the end of the story. It will be a continuous battle between artists, consumers and rip off merchants. BUT… there may be a little spotlight on this stage… go and check out FanFair Alliance. If we all band together, we could make a change.
GlamRat 