I find this astonishing.
Essentially what artists want is a cut of any resale money made from selling on concert tickets. The idea is that when tickets are resold, usually via websites these days, a proportion of the resale value would be passed on to a new body – The Resale Rights Society.
I find this simply staggering.
But there is a problem. Everyone knows that the live music scene is burgeoning, and with it comes a plethora of quickly sold out concerts. Sometimes, if it’s a big artist and a small venue, tickets will sell out in minutes, leaving many fans frustrated.
Along comes eBay, and concert specialists like Seatwave who allow fans to trade tickets… at a mark up. This in turn leads to plenty of ticket buying speculators. No longer is the only way of getting tickets to that sold out concert a question simply of handing over some cash to a dodgy looking bloke outside the venue itself. Instead there are a host of “home traders” who mark up the price and sell the tickets on.
At the moment Spice Girls and Led Zeppelin tickets are hot property.
There have been plenty of attempts to stop this; tickets are sold with no right to pass them on, and at festivals like Glastonbury, they attempt to stop resale by printing photos on the tickets.
The thing is, no matter how strict the rules are, rarely does anyone really check that you have the card you bought the ticket with – they’re just hustling you through the doors and into the venue.
Yet now we have this. Instead of trying to find a solution to fans losing out through this massive resale trade, the artists want a cut of the profits.
How about finding a route for stopping resale, yet letting people unable to make concerts be allowed to either trade at face value or return their tickets to the venue for a refund?
Another option is electronic ticketing, and releasing the tickets very close to the concert itself to minimise the chance that they can be “re-sold”.
But charging fans twice is not the answer.