Is there a better way to resell tickets?

Hello

It’s editorial time on the Mumubl.com newsletter as it finally drops into your inbox again with my thoughts on the goings on in the music industry.

Yep it’s back to music tickets, the most frustrating thing is that nothing seems to change. This was already a long discussed topic when I first posted about it last year – Is there a better way to sell tickets? – and yet here we are looking at the same old issues, oh and some new ones with Ticketmaster’s absurd “in demand” pricing.

I always enjoy the feedback I get from anyone – on any aspect of the content produced at Mumubl.com so please don’t hesitate to get in touch – and of course spread the word – as Grant Nicholas sang on Feeder’s “Echo Park” album “tell all your friends”.

Thanks as always

Dave

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Currently checking out – “Romance” by Fontaines DC

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Another big live gig, another ticketing fiasco. The release of Oasis tickets for their long anticipated 2025 reunion tour was the entirely predictable mess that most of us probably expected. This time though Ticketmaster excelled itself by rolling out what was essentially surge pricing with their “in demand” ticket price hike. An already hefty outlay of £148 for a ticket was suddenly hiked up to around £300 as users finally landed on the ticket selection page. Quite honestly a shocking practice in my eyes and thankfully one that already seems to be on the radar of governments in the UK and US. I also think for this the ire should not exclusively be aimed at Ticketmaster, as they’re making very clear this was ok’d by the band, or at least their management before hand. I really think they should have made a statement about this, but so far they’ve been very quiet.

For a band that are supposedly working class champions the price was already a high one, Taylor swift tickets came in somewhere around £110 for her more recent UK tour, Foo Fighters tickets for their recent dates were around £80. But still, compare this to Paul Heaton who requested to keep prices at £35 for his recent arena tour which has now sold out most dates and will still apparently turn him a profit.

I get it, it’s hard selling tickets, see the previous post on this blog about the whole saga – Is there a better way to sell tickets? There were allegedly 7 million people in online queues for a little over 1 million tickets, you simply can’t facilitate tickets for everyone who wants them. Quite honestly as well I prefer the Ticketmaster queue approach with a number that moves along, or a progress bar to actually get onto the site, to Gigs and Tours with it’s endless anonymous page refresh or SeeTickets which just seemed to be offline. It would be nice though if it was a little clearer, if you knew what you were in the queue for, are the 100000 people ahead of you queuing for tickets just for this date? just for this venue? for Oasis tickets in general across all the gigs? A number of people watched a progress bar crawl across the screen to only then find out they were queuing just to access to Ticketmaster website, and would then face a wait behind those 100,000+ already in the specific queue for Oasis tickets. Add to that the random bot filtering, that seems to take out anyone but the bots, and the dropped connections or failed “add to basket” attempts and you can see why people are upset.

The crux of this though, is those bots, it is those scalpers and one thing that has always puzzled me is that for all the talk of hard action etc very little is done to properly tackle secondary ticketing. A first simple step would be to allow refunds. You can return a ticket to Ticketmaster or wherever and get a refund, minus say a reasonable processing fee. The vendor then sells it on for face value again, although the question of face value becomes a bit murky when Ticketmaster seem to be able to add a surcharge when they like. All of this would surely take a huge bite out of the secondary ticketing marketplace? It creates a single point of focus for specifically buying tickets, the official vendor(s) and no one else.

It does require some policing though and for all the talk of “don’t buy from third party sites” I’m very sceptical as to how many of those tickets, if any, actually get cancelled. This all also leads on to a further suggestion, is it time to ban secondary ticket sales all together? Face value tickets, at the approved seller is surely easy to police. Much like say a plane ticket, put names etc in for those you’re buying tickets for when you buy them and require ID on arrival? Yes it’s a headache but I’m sure fans would take a bit more friction to increase their chance of getting a tickets. And as above you crucially have to allow refunds so people aren’t stuck with tickets if they can’t make a gig. It might not stop the small scale, bloke down the pub selling to someone, type reselling but it would hopefully quickly shutdown any large-scale scalping operation. It would also kill off a large chunk of some companies business operations – such as Viagogo or Stubhub – so maybe that would need to be addressed, even if some people would be happy to say good riddance to them.

I guess this doesn’t need to be an across the board thing but for big shows like this surely it’s high time to look at more drastic steps to address this? Find a trigger for it be that a price point at which you start enforcing this, or a sales point – say 95% of a show is sold out, you need ID and secondary sales are banned. If you go and look at the secondary ticketing sites, and prices, for Oasis at the moment it’s quite clear what is being done at the moment isn’t stopping reselling and removing the incentives for large scale scalping. A big statement needs to be may and you never know we might be surprised and see hundreds turned away as they try to gain entry to Oasis gigs next year with tickets bought from Viagogo but I highly doubt it.