Touting is okay if you're a business, right?

The business of "secondary ticketing" - which might look like touting to you or I, except it's done by men in suits sitting in offices rather than shady looking blokes outside stations bellowing "One Direction BIIIIII OR SELLLL" - is being investigated by the government right now.

The Line of Best Fit has everything you need to know, including the depressing likely outcome:

Unfortunately, it looks like a lot of major businesses and MPs are already attempting to sweep the consulation under the carpet, thus removing the public's right to share their opinion. Sajid Javid - the UK's Business Secretary, no less - even describes touts as "classic entrepreneurs".

Philip Davies is also expressing his opinions:

He says of secondary ticketing regulations: "Needless intervention is not the answer and will only serve to drive many consumers away from safe online platforms and into the arms of street touts."

Davies, you might remember, is the hooting arse-arrangement who most recently filibustered to stop carers being able to park free at hospitals, so it's perhaps unsurprising that someone incapable of compassion is going to bring much to the table in the way of common sense.

TLOBF also report on another shady bit of activity:

StubHub is also resorting to unscrupulous practices. They've created Fan Freedom UK to lobby for further reforms - and, apparently, "analysis of their Twitter shows that over 90% of their followers are fake".

Now, Fan Freedom started out as US thing - hilariously, they've allowed their domain name to lapse in the last couple of days, but archive.org has a grab, and they're still active on Facebook. They have a discussion policy which includes a ban of spam, which is ironic for an organisation which is basically one huge advert. They have a Change.org petition, which - while acknowledging their origins as floating on a sea of StubHub cash, starts by enthusing over their supporters:

Fan Freedom is supported by more than 150,000 live event fans, and is backed by leading consumer and business organizations such as the American Conservative Union, National Consumers League, Consumer Action, the Institute for Liberty, and the League of Fans.

Yes, that's right. Almost as if they forgot the whole "we're the voice of the fans" schtick, they start their list of supporters with a right-wing lobbying organisation.

What of the British cousin? They actually have managed to keep control of their own website, so that's a plus.

Fan Freedom UK is an organisation dedicated to fighting for the consumer rights of fans, specifically around ticketing issues. As part of this, we represent all kinds of people who enjoy live entertainment – from fans who sit in the rain week in and week out to watch their team, to music fans who stay out until the early hours to enjoy the bands they love.

From the fans who get up in the middle of the night to check their money is still there, to the fans who spend a lot of time talking to accountants and lobbyists to protect the money they love.

Like their American model, though, they don't do very much to hide the fact that they're actually a bunch of lobbyists - there's a proud "supported by Parliament Street" banner on their site, and Parliament Street are a swivel-eyed right-wing thinky tank:

We are a think tank rooted in the values of freedom. We think beyond the current policy agenda and look towards the debates that are likely to be formed by the next generation in government. We don’t have a corporate view beyond our values.

They're chaired by Craig Rimmer, who, his bio proudly proclaims:

He was Head of Information at Conservative Central Office during William Hague’s leadership.

You'll remember amongst the "information" that came out of the Tory party during what I suppose we could loosely describe as Hague's leadership was the claim that voting for Tony Blair would result in the abandonment of the pound. This was only a marginally less credible claim about losing pounds than those of Marjorie Dawes.

So, somehow, on both sides of the Atlantic, the authentic voice of people who go to gigs seems to be being filtered through extremely well-paid lobbyists, all of whom are hell-bent on right-wing, state-shrinking policies.

If these "voices" get their way, it's not going to make secondary ticketing any better. We're more likely to end up with only secondary agencies being allowed to buy tickets directly. To save us from the touts, of course.

Stop this bollocks from happening by adding your actual voice to the consultation. Don't let right wing thinky tanks steal your front row slot.

Mick Jagger defends ticket prices

The Rolling Stones have been on something of a charm offensive the last couple of days to justify the gougy prices for tickets on the current tour.

Obviously, we know the justification for a ninety quid starting price point - it's what people will pay and the band are greedy.

That isn't what Mick Jagger says, though:

You might say, 'The tickets are too expensive' - well, it's a very expensive show to put on, just to do four shows, because normally you do a hundred shows and you'd have the same expenses.

Um... Up to a point. Yes, your fixed costs would be spread over a lot more gigs, but let's be clear that this isn't some sort of U2 multimedia bollocks where the band arrive in a spaceship made from guitars, so a large wedge of the outgoings will be marginal - venue hire, electricity, staff, and whatever it takes to stop Keith Richards turning into a pile of dust for another day.

Mick knows that, and so instead embarks on trying a spot of distraction, by pointing instead at the secondary market:

"So, yes, it's expensive," he added. "But most of the tickets go for a higher price than we've sold them for, so you can see the market is there. We don't participate in the profit. If a ticket costs 250 quid. let's imagine, and goes for 1,000 quid, I just want to point out that we don't get that difference."

True, but just because they gouge on top of the original price doesn't alter the fact that the original price was already ratcheted up.

Who's scalping who? Artists tout their own tickets

Something to remember the next time you see artists and promoters getting upset about people flogging tickets on at inflated prices: some artists are doing the scalping themselves:

Less than a minute after tickets for last August's Neil Diamond concerts at New York's Madison Square Garden went on sale, more than 100 seats were available for hundreds of dollars more than their normal face value on premium-ticket site TicketExchange.com. The seller? Neil Diamond.

Ticket reselling -- also known as scalping -- is an estimated $3 billion-a-year business in which professional brokers buy seats with the hope of flipping them to the public at a hefty markup.

In the case of the Neil Diamond concerts, however, the source of the higher-priced tickets was the singer, working with Ticketmaster Entertainment Inc., which owns TicketExchange, and concert promoter AEG Live. Ticketmaster's former and current chief executives, one of whom is Mr. Diamond's personal manager, have acknowledged the arrangement, as has a person familiar with AEG Live, which is owned by Denver-based Anschutz Corp.

So, it's absolutely fine for artists to deliberately hold tickets back, in order to flog them at artificially-inflated prices. But somehow, it's wrong for ordinary people to sell on tickets they no longer need at slightly higher price, and photographic IDs must be used when buying tickets to stop this practice.

The artists sales are done through Ticketmaster's official scalping site, with - as the Wall Street Journal points out - usually no indication that the sales are coming from 'official' sources rather than a selling-on by fans. Indeed, lengths seem to be traveled in order to make it look like it's coming from fans:

Tickets for a March 27 Britney Spears concert at Mellon Arena in Pittsburgh were priced earlier this week at $39.50 to $125 apiece on Ticketmaster.com. But some of those same classes of seats were being offered at the same time through the "TicketExchange Marketplace" for as much as $1,188.60. The link to the Marketplace page was marked, "Browse premium seats plus tickets posted by fans."

Ms. Spears' spokeswoman declined to comment.

The ticket listings are offered in small batches, each at a price, such as $1,164.01, that mimics prices set via online auctions. After inquiries from The Wall Street Journal, the "tickets posted by fans" message was removed from the TicketExchange Web site. Prices also fell, narrowing the gap between Ticketmaster and TicketExchange Marketplace.

That this is all unethical is beyond question; perhaps more pertinent is the question of if it's entirely legal?

Semi-professional touting

The Concert Promoters Association are anti-touts. They don't think you should be able to sell on tickets you've come into legitimately. And the wanted the government to crack down and stop people making money out of flogging tickets on.

The government said no, so the CPA have suddenly decided they're going to make money from flogging tickets on.

They've launched a website which will allow purchase of second-hand tickets with a degree of confidence. It's called OfficialBoxOffice.com, and if you want to sell a ticket, you'll be called upon to provide enough details to allow the concert promoter to say "that's fine". And, if things do go wrong, the CPA have some vague promise about recompense:

In the event that a buyer is let down by a seller, the CPA says attempts will be made to get the fan into the gig anyway or offer a 100 per cent refund.

And you can see what makes it attractive to the CPA - offering a safe, guaranteed space for ticket resale will presumably make it harder for the bad guys to thrive. A site with guarantees - what possible disincentive could there be for honest chaps to sell their tickets through it, making it clear that any other sites offering tickets must be slightly dodgy?

The new website, called OfficialBoxOffice.com, will operate "at cost" rather than "for profit" and will charge a 12.5 per cent booking fee to the buyer - whilst it's free for the seller.

Ah, a massive mark-up. "If you want to sell your tickets here, they'll appear to be massively inflated compared with other sites." That's quite a pitch.

How, incidentally, have the CPA come up with this hefty mark-up as being "at cost"? And how can a percentage amount dumped on top of the ticket be costs-based? Surely the cost of processing a £10 ticket is the same as the cost of processing a £100 ticket? Or does the extra key stroke really put that much strain on the system?

Presumably an element of this money must be getting earmarked to provide refunds - but that seems morally questionable, in the sense that the money is coming explicitly from the purchaser and not the seller: in effect, it's forcing customers to insure the guarantee that CPA is providing. And not costing the seller a bean, despite the seller being the weak link in the chain.

Not quite sure how the CPA plans to make this sort-of-legitimate system work with photo ids and mobile phone tickets and all the other paraphernalia of proposals floating about.

Or, indeed, how the CPA can continue to offer a resale service while printing "not transferable" on gig tickets - isn't that a little like the US government selling peanuts and cocktail napkins during prohibition.

Ticket 'fraud' site closed by the cops

The police. They're not just there to run around making sure you're not putting a 1979 live recording of The Selector online, you know. They've just done a raid to close allegedly dodgy ticket agency Paperticket.co.uk down. The NME weighs the implications:

A secondary ticket website has been shut down amid fears of fraud, leaving thousands of fans potentially out of pocket.

- although if the company was behaving fraudulently, surely the ticket holders will be, at worse, no further out of pocket because the company has been closed than they would have been had they simply not got the tickets they had requested?