Comment: Tackling the ticket touts Published on: 24 June 2024 Writing for The Conversation, Dr Adam Behr discusses why finally, the time to tackle ticket touts may have come. Tickets are a unique type of purchase because fans are emotionally invested but supply is controlled. , Attempts dating back well over a decade to introduce specific financial mechanisms for ticket resales are yet to result in legal controls to protect fans. So itās notable that the cultural plan in singles out ticket touting for making āaccess to music, drama and sport ā¦ difficult and expensiveā. Promising to āput fans back at the heart of eventsā with new consumer protections, it follows previous plans to tackle touting, including the introduction of a cap on resale prices. Clearly, this was never going to be popular with touts. A lobby group for ticket resale platforms, the Coalition for Ticket Fairness (CTF), has vowed to all the way. Itās the latest in a series of skirmishes between resale platforms, the touts who buy up swathes of tickets for resale at swingeing mark-ups, and politicians seeking to regulate the secondary market. A private fundraising meeting for the CTF garnered pledges of , and itās easy to see why the denizens of the secondary market are concerned that their comparatively easy ride might be getting bumpier. The Labour manifesto doesnāt specify a figure ā ā although a cap of some kind on resold tickets looks likely. This would still allow a small profit, or at least prevent losses, for people passing on tickets that they canāt use. But it would significantly undermine the business model of scooping up blocks of tickets to sell on at many times their face value. Take the money out of touting Itās not a new idea. Labourās Sharon Hodgson introduced a to impose a cap. This followed huge growth in touting as ticketing moved online in the 2000s. Successive inquiries and reports by the and had held back from statutory regulation beyond existing provisions to combat fake tickets. So Hodgsonās idea was to āā as a disincentive to industrial-scale touting. Her bill was (when the debate went on too long to allow a vote) but about how sites marketed as fan exchanges were being used by professional touts put the issue on to the political agenda. There was growing dismay too at the size of the mark-ups and on the primary market. An was formed (co-chaired by Hodgson), and campaigning by the on the issue gained traction. Labourās proposal now resonates with an overarching direction of travel. The introduced measures to curtail the use of bots to automatically purchase tickets. A 2019 Culture, Media and Sport Committee was also strongly critical of secondary sellers, calling for more extensive scrutiny by the Competition and Markets Authority and recommending that consumers avoid companies like Viagogo. As the Culture Committee report noted, though, part of the difficulty surrounding ticketing is that the market is ācomplex and fragmentedā. The lines between the primary and secondary markets have historically been blurred, such as when the leading primary seller ā Ticketmaster ā bought secondary sites Get Me In and Seatwave in 2008, in 2018 as unease grew around resales. And these complications are exacerbated because the market for tickets involves an emotional investment that often goes beyond that for other types of good. Concert-goers are rather than straightforward consumers. On top of this, unlike other musical or cultural products (like recordings or films) tickets are āā ā one person holding a ticket means that someone else cannot. Scarcity is baked in. Unlike with other types of resale (secondhand books, for example), tickets disappearing from the face-value vendors with the specific goal of being sold on for profit means the secondary market can distort the primary one. Tickets are whatās known as ārivalrous goodsā ā if you get in, someone else wonāt. Part of what makes a ticket purchase so distinctive, and the debate so fraught, is the pressurised nature of the purchase ā time-limited opportunity for access to a cultural event is mixed into emotional connection to an artist, and the often opaque mechanisms of the marketplace. Indeed, what drew Hodgsonās attention to the secondary market was the experience of trying to buy for herself and her daughter, and finding Ā£55 pairs of tickets on sale for four figures. Fandom, and cultural experiences, are not easily quantifiable, and questions of āfairnessā and āreal fansā sit uneasily alongside the need to put a figure on access. Thereās also the possibility that some fans who really want to attend an event prioritise getting in the door over wider concerns about consumer regulation. Opponents of more stringent regulation suggest this will , worsening the problem of fake tickets. This is a concern, of course, although forgeries are already illegal. In a market characterised by international activity, looking at the primary market too may well be in the offing. The 2010 merger between Ticketmaster (the largest ticketing platform) and Live Nation (the biggest concert promoter) was passed by regulators in multiple countries despite of ownership being excessively concentrated. Now, the US Department of Justice is considering . A recent culture committee report on grassroots venues took a , favouring a levy on stadium and arena tickets to provide financial support to smaller operators at risk in an ever-tougher marketplace. But at the upper end of the market too, it appears that the consensus is shifting and that it may be time for Hodgsonās idea to come to fruition. , Senior Lecturer in Popular and Contemporary Music, This article is republished from under a Creative Commons license. Read the . 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