“Bands Seek Piece of Ticket Scalpers’ Action”
Fisted by stinkfinger under Uncategorized on Tue, May 6, 2008
Tags: business, information, music, News, The Internet
[2] Comments
This is from last December, Wired via ABC. I don’t know how I missed this, since legalized high larceny is something I follow with interest–
Thoughts, opinions, welcome.
Bands Seek Piece of Ticket Scalpers’ Action
Dec. 6, 2007With CD sales tanking, bands and their managers are looking to squeeze extra cash out of the live-music revenue stream by getting a piece of online ticket scalpers’ profits.
Now Radiohead, The Verve and more than 400 other bands have joined the Resale Rights Society, a new British industry group that wants to levy fees against websites that facilitate so-called secondary sales of tickets. The money would be used to compensate artists, managers, booking agents and promoters.
“It does not make sense to try and criminalize (ticket scalping),” said Marc Margot, former Island Records chief and chairman-elect of the Resale Rights Society, which was announced Tuesday. “On the other hand, there are not only real issues of consumer protection here, (but) it is unacceptable that not a penny of the estimated 200 million pounds in (annual) transactions generated by the resale of concert tickets in the U.K. is returned to the investors in the live-music industry.”
Many fans see ticket scalping as unfair, and in some U.S. states the practice is limited or illegal. But others see sites like Seat Exchange, eBay and StubHub — which let scalpers resell concert tickets at whatever price the market will bear — as a natural part of the music ecosystem. And some fans simply recognize scalpers as the easiest route to getting great seats to sold-out shows.
But just as record labels are going after a portion of concert receipts with their so-called 360 deals, managers and bands are salivating over ticket scalpers’ hefty markups.
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Alayna Hupp
Naomi Holland
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Utzler
May 7th, 2008 at 7:31 am
I just found an interesting article.
Ticketmaster is now benefiting from the secondary ticket market and used Radiohead to get there.
Read the article here.
May 7th, 2008 at 9:55 am
Thanks for the heads-up on that, Julia.
The page to which you are referred from Ticketmaster has actually changed since the article was written on April 16th.
Previously, it said:
Now it says:
Yet, when we view this situation in the light of the article I posted here…well, someone, somewhere along the line is not being completely honest. Right now, it looks like the band is in on it, at least indirectly through the newly established “Resale Rights Society.”
Anyway, this is legalized larceny. When Ticketmaster ostensibly “sells out,” yet has in fact sold a reserve of tickets (240 in the case of their Washington concert at the White River Ampitheatre, Aug. 20th) to themselves (TicketsNow having been acquired by Ticketmaster)…how is then in any sense a “value-added” product? What benefit is the consumer paying for, in increased price?
What this is, without mincing words: An artificially contrived or “engineered scarcity” so Ticketmaster can rape us all in the ass.
Legal larceny: this is just like the case of ticket-scalping in Texas, where the lawmakers are all up in arms about small-time scalpers in trench coats outside stadiums, BECAUSE they get no tax revenue off those sales – BUT, licensed, tax-paying resellers can screw you coming and going, and that’s okay.
This is a byproduct of apathy: once there’s a crack in the door, and no one is freaking out (as in the case of relaxing resale legislation in multiple American states), you can take the next step, which is this.