So we’re not particularly pleased with eBay’s policy towards ticket auctions here at Indie Cred, even if, I admit, we’ve bought tickets that way in the past. We’ve never spent much more than the ticket price though. The Ledge did, on one occasion, sell a pair of Arcade Fire tickets that we could not use (as the Pixies announced a tour date the same night). The intention though was to take the money from the auction of our pair and use it to buy tickets to the Sheffield gig, which we did not manage to do in the end. But not for lack of trying. If we’d known about Scarlet Mist at the time, we’d have done it that way and tried to arrange a swap.

But I digress.

I have another story.

This is the story of the man known to someone I know, who walked into his office last Friday afternoon and began bragging about how he’d bought four Killers tickets and had placed two of them straight onto eBay and the bidding was already at over £200. This is the story of the fan who thinks it’s cool and acceptable to rip off other fans. Now, surely being a fan of a band makes you part of a larger community. It means that you share something in common with others, something that ties you together, because, face it, music is important to us in our lives, we get very emotional about it. We should understand that others with the same passion feel the same emotion. We should understand that the elation we feel when our favourite band tours or releases a record is the same elation other fans feel. We should understand that the abject disappointment and misery we would feel if we failed to get tickets to a gig is the same that other fans feel. And we should understand that if we did not get tickets to see our favourite band and went on an internet auction site and found other fans trying to fleece us we’d probably become homicidal.

Why do fans take advantage of other fans?

A very nice woman on a forum when I brought this up told me that she always buys extra tickets for popular gigs if she manages to get through and get any tickets. She can then offer these to fans on the band’s forum at face value so that people who were unlucky have a chance to get the tickets they missed out on without having to pay over the odds to a tout. To me, this is how music fans should behave. They should treat each other with the care and kindness and respect they want themselves.

Fandom is not a competition, it’s a shared experience.

So a word of warning to all you “fans” out there who wish to take advantage of other fans. When the revolution happens, you’ll be the first ones with your backs against the wall.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 19th, 2006 at 8:12 pm by JustHipper and is filed under Rant. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.