To think that ticket selling for big gigs is a total scam and the genuine fans are suffering

[plipplops]

This is a long one, apologies in advance...

DD (15) wanted to see Sabrina Carpenter in Birmingham next March. She's 15 and autistic, we have an Access Card which means she can get a free carer's ticket for someone to accompany her to things like this. Tickets on general release yesterday (Thursday).

I'd looked on the Utilita Arena website beforehand and it said tickets were going to be £60-100ish. I'd also rung the Accessible Ticket line to ask how it works as it can be complicated? Spoke to someone at the Ticket Factory who's their ticketing partner. They just said to call if we had issues. Ticket Factory also had a presale thing you could sign up to to buy them on the Wednesday which I did.

She follows SC on Instagram and had signed up to the VIP presale 'you're special' thing which gives you early access to buying tickets on the Tuesday.

On Tuesday she gets sent a link which takes you to Ticketmaster, with a 'you're 16,500th in the queue'. At the same time I called the Ticket Factory Accessible phone line. We're both on hold for 45 minutes.

She gets to the front of the queue, and all it offers her is two tickets at £350 each!!! At almost exactly the same time I get through on the phone and they sell me two tickets (one normal, one carer's free one) for about £80.

So we've got tickets, great, but what about every other fan??

The next day, I click on the link from Ticket Factory just out of interest. It tells me I'm 19,000th in the queue and also that the presale tickets have sold out anyway, so to try at 10am Thursday for normal sale ones (like I say, I don't need to buy any more at this point but I'm down the rabbit hole by now).

At the same time, on Viagogo there are loads of resale tickets available, that all have a face value of £60-£100 being sold from £200-£2300.

What the actual fuck is going on? None of those are being sold by fans who bought them through the presale the day before, then have suddenly realised they can't make it and are trying to sell them on.

Yesterday they went on sale properly for general release, sold out immediately.

So my question is, who's making the money here? And if you're just a genuine fan, how do you get your hands on tickets for anything like the normal face value? Do the artists make the extra cash, and if not how is this allowed to happen?

I feel so sad and enraged for all the regular fans who just want to see stuff, and are being fleeced by a system they just can't figure out.

That's it really. Thanks if you've hung on this far!

Someone thinks IABU, I'd love to know why? Do you have some way of buying tickets through the back door and are making a fortune on Viagogo?

Completely agree with you.

Artists make so little from their actual music now which has understandably inflated prices on live music, but the ticket resale sites are ridiculous. I don’t think the industry does enough to prevent this.

It’s frustrating, but it’s not a scam: Ticketmaster controls how many tickets an individual can purchase at any one time, to try to prevent scalping, but they can’t read the minds of every purchaser in order to know what they’re going to do with the tickets post-sale. Some events require that the person buying the tickets is also the person who attends by way of showing ID, but that makes things difficult for people who genuinely need to re-sell after purchase, or for younger people whose parents have bought the tickets and weren’t planning to attend themselves. Some artists stipulate that official ticket sellers must stick to a ceiling price, but if they don’t then prices increase as demand increases, which is commonplace in all kinds of markets from concerts to rail tickets to airfare.

The thing that gets me is the dynamic pricing ( so prices change according to demand) and all the vip packages making tickets unaffordable ( the VIP is often a bit of merch which I don’t think makes enough of a difference)

I think selling tickets so far in advance is part of the problem. For theatre your buying tickets a year before the show has even been cast! It causes people to panic/impulse buy for fear of missing out, but nearer the time there's a big pool of unwanted tickets needing to be exchanged or resold. Some will be genuine but the fake and hiked prices get into the mix. Fans who are desperate for tickets are vulnerable to being scammed and disappointed at this stage.

The resellers aren’t going to stop allowing inflated prices as it means they make more fees.

Other than refusing to pay that amount and only using Twickets, I’m not sure what else could be done.

It is annoying, especially when tickets go for crazy amounts.

The new government is planning to make reforms to stop ticket touting like this. I don’t know how to link but if you google the guardian how touts drew up secret plans to sabotage Labour’s ticket reforms you will see the article.
Viagogo was one of those named.

Some artists insist on keeping their tickets at a reasonable amount by avoiding resale. Ed Sheeran manages to do this, annoying more don't.

I don’t think ‘genuine fans’ have any more moral right to tickets than people who use them to make some some money. There will always be people who can’t afford tickets no matter how much of a fan they are, and it’s not like anyone actually needs them.

I was able to get tickets for Sabrina but I was very very lucky, between me and my friend we had 6 presales, and it was way harder than Eras tickets. I do think Sabrina has that unique issue due to when planning this tour she was doing well and on the up, but between the planning stages and release of tickets her stardom has gone stratospheric meaning so much more demand than anticipated. She seemed to have three categories: standard tickets, dynamic priced tickets, and packages. Of course all the standard cheaper ones went first only leaving £260-£385 tickets quite quickly.

Tickets are getting more and more expensive, and I think if artists want to charge that much and make what the touts make, then they should make active steps to preventing touts at their gigs. Lead booker events do this quite successfully.

Artists don't directly make any money from the ticket prices. Ticket prices are set by the promoter and are based on several things ..
Artists make additional money based on # of tickets sold

The dynamic pricing thing is horrible. There was a play in the West End called Cock a couple of years ago starring somebody from Bridgerton and tickets were going for £400 each (Time Out headline 'How much would you pay for Cock').
I've go to a lot of concerts. My first was Queen for £3.75 at Bristol Hippodrome. I'm starting to get priced out now.
Even mediocre (to me) acts like The Corrs are playing the O2 and charging £100+ a seat. Are they having a laugh?!
The artists definitely have a say if they want to. Elbow at the O2 recently were £50 and Paul Heaton has said that his tickets will be no more than £35 and he'll still make a profit.
I get that no-one is buying music any more and they need to make a living somehow but it's gone too far now.

The industry tried, the Tories would not allow it

https://amp.theguardian.com/money/2023/may/11/touts-to-remain-rampant-on-resale-sites-after-uk-government-avoids-crackdown

https://accessaa.co.uk/live-events-industry-welcomes-labour-party-commitment-to-stamp-out-online-ticket-touts/

Of course they do, the higher the ticket price the larger the fee.

Artists’ agents and management are fully aware and approve all ticket prices prior to on sale.

Went to a big gig where the ticket buyer had to be present at the gate with ID, bit slower going in but meant that genuine fans got to see the artist at the original ticket price.

But look at all the moaning when they tried to do something like this for Taylor Swift - parents buying for their kids, giving tickets as presents, genuine people who can’t go and can’t resell.

Yes the Sabrina Carpenter thing was crazy considering she is a new artist. DD ended up paying £200 for a ticket which is more than double than she paid for Taylor Swift! Does it work then with Ticketmaster that the more people that are online trying to get tickets the more they cost? That seems very unfair.

I think that moaning was largely because they tried to introduce it halfway through the two weeks of presales, many people had bought tickets before it was the rule and were concerned they would be impacted as they would now fall foul of this. If it's the rule beforehand and well advertised as such, including a screen confirming this on the way to checkout, then it can be planned for and not an issue. Regarding reselling tickets you can via Ticketmaster which is great for fans as (at least for Taylor Swift) they were price capped so could only be upsold for an extra 15% which in most cases was just enough to recover all fees.

yes, the Artist management & agent in conjunction with the promoter and ticketmaster can change the price of tickets according to demand at any time.

this is not done automatically by ticketmaster as it needs approval from all parties.

yes and no. Sabrina did use dynamic pricing on some tickets "platinum" is code for dynamically priced, but not all. Some were just normal tickets (these sold out very quick) and some were your standard package tickets (inflated price for ticket + merch).

A friend in the industry spoke to me about dynamic pricing and explained with the idea of - if fans are prepared to spend £300 on a ticket then why should a tout get it? Why not the artist, their team, and the venue? The idea behind dynamic pricing is that all that resale profit would make its way not the hands of the people putting on the show. I sort of get the theory, but I just don't think it works for a show which is so overly subscribed that it will sell out in minutes, the price will just be driven up to the limit and stay there, not fluctuate over months until the show happens or sells out.

They should make all concerts pay on the door on the night, no tickets. Back to how it used to be.

My days of going to arena gigs are long past, and now I mostly go to small independent venues. One of the attractions was being able to look at the listings on Saturday afternoon and just rock up that evening and see the band.

But recently I've seen gigs cancelled because pre-sales are too slow and the artist / venue / both can't be sure of covering their costs. I've spoken to a few artists about it, and this is a real issue. So pay-on-the-door only would probably mean very few performances ever taking place, sadly.

(I'm now mixing and matching between booking a week ahead and turning up on the day; can't always know if I'll be free until the day).

Imagine sell on the day/first come first served for Sabrina carpenter, would be chaos 😂