If you thought ticket prices couldn’t get any higher then you could be in for a nasty surprise. The prospect of tickets being auctioned to the highest bidder is looming and it could affect music, sports and other events where there is an excess of demand over supply.

A number of recent developments in Britain and the US point squarely in this direction. In 2002, the Chicago Cubs led the way by holding back a proportion of tickets for sold-out games and effectively ‘touting’ them officially by selling them to the highest bidders through a broker attached to the baseball club.
Touting is an ongoing source of contention for rock promoters. If a promoter or an artist sells a ticket for e80, which is then re-sold for e200, a disconnected outsider is making a profit at the expense of the artist, the promoter, the consumer – or all three. It is not a situation anyone could defend, apart, perhaps, from the touts themselves.
Perversely, however, it may be that attempts to combat touting will be the trigger that raises ticket prices. Recent initiatives in the US and Britain, described as anti-touting measures, could lead to customers there paying prices even more exorbitant than those charged by street-side sellers.
What happens in the Irish market is usually heavily influenced by the US and the UK – and if the same measures are adopted here, we could soon see an official system in place where concert goers will be forced to bid against each other for tickets.
CANCELLED TICKETS
In the run-up to the recent T in the Park in Scotland organisers DF Concerts apparently received numerous complaints about tickets being sold for a huge profit on eBay. In response, they searched the auction site, identified the sellers and cancelled the tickets which they had purchased.
In the wake of this, DF Concerts, along with other music industry representatives, met with British Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell to discuss measures to ensure that fans don’t get ripped off.
As partners of DF Concerts – T In The Park is a sister event to the Oxegen Festival – Irish promoters MCD were heavily involved in the clampdown. According to Justin Green, the company’s spokesman, MCD supported these actions and have begun instigating similar measures in this country.
MCD are not alone among promoters in their concern about touts. Speaking to hotpress, John Reynolds of POD Concerts was scathing about profiteering by people who give nothing to either the music scene or the public.
Reynolds was unequivocal in advising those who haven’t bought tickets for the sold-out Electric Picnic (which he co-promotes with Aiken Promotions) not to deal with touts. “I would say to anyone that hasn’t bought a ticket from Ticketmaster not to buy one,” he said, “because we’re going to be scanning them and I think that some, if not all, of the tickets that are for sale on auction sites like eBay will not pass the scanning procedures. Potentially, people will have paid way over the price that they should be charged – and they won’t be allowed in.”
Reynolds believes that the Anti-Touting bill proposed by Fine Gael (see panel) over a year ago should be passed into law as quickly as possible. “I can’t really understand why it is taking so long to go through,” he says. “As far as I’m concerned these people are rip-off merchants and in some cases they may even be criminals – something really needs to be done.”
LEGITIMATE STAKE
Ireland is not alone in failing to introduce legislation to deal specifically with touts. While the meeting with Tessa Jowell reportedly provided some useful recommendations, the official line is that there will be no change in the UK law in the immediate future.
Another option open to promoters is the introduction of a ticket auctioning system. One industry insider in the UK suggested to hotpress that the current focus on touting is a way of making this seem more palatable prospect for fans.
The auctioning of tickets has been standard in US sports for years. However, in what was a major step for the concert business, the first all-auction gig event, INXS at the Lobero Theatre in California, took place in June this year. The concert was a complete sell-out, with auctioned tickets going from $20 to $350.
According to industry sources, the system has been championed in the US by concert promoters keen to soak up the profits from the so-called secondary ticket market currently controlled by touts and estimated to be worth around $10 billion per annum.
Supporters of the proposal insist that this takes the power away from touts and puts it back in the hands of the regular gig-goer – although this is debatable. The best seats for the US leg of Madonna’s Confessions of a Dancefloor tour had a face value of $380, but when the auctioning started on Ticketmaster, they fetched up to $800 – as much, if not more, than what the touts would have been asking for. What is indisputable is that a greater proportion of the total revenues generated – including what had gone through touts in the past – ends up in the hands of the artists and the promoters. But there is little doubt that the wholesale auctioning of tickets favour the wealthy over those with lesser means.
Whatever about those kind of scruples, the ticket auction is on the way. Although there are no immediate plans to introduce this system here, MCD have told hotpress that it will probably happen at some stage.