So it seems that Glastonbury only sold 100,000 of 137,000 tickets when they went on sale over the weekend. Now this could be because of the horrible lineup (Jay-Z? Really? Ugh.) – not that a bad lineup has ever stopped people in the past. It could be because of the weather – but the weather is vile almost every year. Or, perhaps, it could be that the new anti-touting measures have worked and we’ve seen what the actual demand is instead of the fake demand created by touts and people trying to make a fast buck off other music fans. Considering that Reading/Leeds, T in the Park and V Festivals all sold out immediately, I’m thinking it’s that last one myself.

For better or worse (it’s looking like for worse at the moment), we purchased T in the Park tickets. Unlike last year, when we managed to get 1 ticket between 3 of us, this year we managed to get 4 tickets between 3 of us. Why four you ask? Well, you could only get a maximum of 2 and 3 of us wanted to go. To avoid last year’s problem we opted to try for 2 from each household. It worked. The number of people who did the same is probably pretty high. We offered our spare to a friend who accepted. Most people will have gone straight to eBay. If touting were illegal, this dilemma may not have occurred. It would also have prevented the several hundred tickets that were on eBay within minutes of the festival selling out being on there at outrageous prices. Or the hundreds that will be sold via eBay, Gumtree and other, similar sites and through dodgy ticket resellers between now and mid-July.

When hundreds of tickets go on sale every day, it suggests that an extremely large percentage of the tickets for T in the Park (or any festival or major gig) are going to touts, not to fans. So people aren’t getting the helpful opportunity to buy tickets from resellers when they miss out because they didn’t know something was on sale or couldn’t get to the phone or computer, they are being forced to buy tickets this way because touts (and we mean you, music fans who are selling your spares above face value, as well) are cornering the market and artificially driving up ticket prices.

Now, Word Magazine had an interesting suggestion which they claim will sort everything out without the need for legislation – just don’t buy tickets at inflated prices. But can you imagine being a 16 or 18 year old who’s missed out on getting a ticket to the gig or festival you’ve been dreaming of for months or years, finding out all your friends managed to get those tickets and then being faced with the dilemma of paying 2x, 4x or even 6x the face value but not missing out or staying home and feeling like a social outcast? It’s not going to happen.

With the kids starting to go to gigs now for the first time having this scenario as the norm, they will just accept it and nothing will change. If anything, it will get worse – and the bands and artists aren’t even benefitting from this. The touts are actually making more money per ticket than the artists are in many cases. If you consider that a £30 ticket to the Manchester Apollo for the Arcade Fire was selling for a couple hundred pounds, you have to wonder about a government commission that tells us that these people are offering a useful service when what they are really doing is making a living by being disrespectful to the artists and disrespectful to the fans. These people take pride in contributing nothing to the betterment of society and instead would rather make a living off other people’s hard work instead of their own. To me, that behavior is not only unethical and greedy, it’s highly anti-social.

Word Magazine suggested that maybe touting agencies should be required to pay royalties to the artists. Well now, that won’t make them raise their prices further, now will it?

When you consider that the ticket touting, ahem, reselling industry makes a living by trying to disguise the fact they are resellers, offering tickets for sale that have not been bought yet, and is full of companies that take people’s cash and never deliver, you have to wonder that the government has not cottoned onto the fact that this is not legitimate business any more than the spam emails we get from “universities” offering degrees and the ones offering prescription drugs prescribed “legally” are legitimate businesses.

When will the people who make the laws wake up and see that they should be encouraging entrepreneurship and community, not greed and laziness? Make touting illegal.

Oh, and if you miss out on tickets, or you end up with spares, please use Scarlet Mist.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 8th, 2008 at 9:07 pm by JustHipper and is filed under ebay, gigs, Rant, stop touting, Tickets, touting. 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.