Among the baby photos and moans about the weather cluttering up my timeline the other day, a Facebook post by my friend Elaine caught my eye.
She’d been trying to buy tickets for a Jamiroquai gig at The Roundhouse in London on 31 March. Armed with one old-fashioned telephone and three devices, she’d been desperately dialling and refreshing web pages since the moment the tickets went on sale. But the tickets sold out in minutes and she wasn’t one of the lucky ones.
My first thought was ‘why am I friends with people with such terrible taste in music?’ My second was ‘I bet the tickets are already for sale on Viagogo for loads of money’.
I was right, of course. I always am. The band’s Facebook page was full of fans complaining tickets to the gig had sold out in a minute and were now for sale on secondary ticket websites for several times their £60.50 face value. ‘Virtual insanity’ indeed.
A quick trip to Viagogo confirmed the controversial secondary ticket seller was now selling tickets to the gig for £514 – a tidy profit on a ticket costing £60.50. Desperate fans are then pressurised into buying the tickets by messages such as ‘We predict this event will be sold out in 10 days’ and ‘prices have been rising over the last three days’ (or ‘past’ three days as you’d say if you wanted to be grammatically correct).
I’m not going to go into the cosy little relationships between primary tickets sellers such as Ticketmaster and secondary sellers such as GetMeIn, Seatwave, StubHub and Viagogo. Or in turn, their deals with so-called ‘power sellers’ and professional touts who use ‘bots’ to snap up popular tickets and then flog them on at a huge profit. It’s all been said before. In fact, the whole dodgy set up was discussed recently in the House of Lords.
Some MPs have put forward amendments to the digital economy bill that would outlaw much of the ticket resale industry. Among them is a rule that would stop anyone reselling a ticket unless they had been authorised in writing to do so by the event organiser. The proposal would see touts hit with fines of up to £5,000 for reselling tickets at a massive mark-up.
As it stands at the moment, many secondary sites ignore guidelines set down by artists about ticket resales – and it’s the fans who suffer when they discovered their ridiculously expensive tickets literally leave them out in the cold.
According to The Roundhouse in Chalk Farm, where Jamiroquai’s only UK gig is being held, fans will be turned away at the door if they turn up with a ticket bought on a reselling site. To gain access, the ‘lead booker’ must have ID which matches the name the ticket was purchased in and their guest (a maximum of two tickets can be purchased at any one time) must arrive with them. It clearly says: ‘tickets acquired through a secondary source will be invalid’.
Of course, there’s no mention of this on the Viagogo website – it’s happy just to take your money.
If you think event organisers wouldn’t be so cruel to turn away Jamiroquai fans who’ve paid £500 for a ticket, think again.
Back in November, Welsh rockers Catfish and the Bottlemen stated that tickets acquired through a secondary source would not be valid for their sold-out show at Wembley. But Viagogo flogged them to unsuspecting fans anyway, and they subsequently weren’t allowed in. The disappointed gig-goers included the 13-year-old daughter of Spectator journalist Toby Young.
When questioned, Viagogo claimed it was ‘perfectly legal’ to resell concert tickets and blamed event organisers saying their ‘heavy handed approach’ only hurt the people that wanted to see the show. It promised refunds to all concerned. The Spectator contacted Viagogo for comment about Jamiroquai but is yet to receive a reply.
Of course, there’s one simple way that music fans can stop secondary ticket sellers ripping them off: don’t buy from them. If people refused point blank to trade with touts, they’d be out of business in no time. So how about it, music fans?
Emma Lunn is a freelance personal finance journalist
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