International pop star Ed Sheeran has just announced tour dates and ticket agencies have gone in to melt down mode, with secondary sellers trying to pawn off tickets at unreasonable prices. A similar issue occurred in Australia when Adele’s run of local shows went on sale. The demand was simply too great, and people were unable to get tickets due to websites crashing, while it also revealed the subsequent issue of secondary re-sellers, such as The Ticket Merchant and viagogo. The Melbourne show was reported to sell out in 30 minutes, with an alleged rate of 2000 tickets per minute sold. Overall, for her Australia tour, there have been over 400,000 tickets sold. Ticketmaster have legalised ticket scalping through their official re-seller website, however there are no rules on how much re-sellers can sell their tickets for. I personally have used this service for tickets to A Day on the Green recently, and I was thrilled to get front row tickets for 50% of the original price. This was due to a legitimate re-seller who simply could not attend and wanted to move the tickets on. However, while on this site, I noticed other tickets that were marked up massively, and clearly these are from people who have purchased tickets with the sole intention of selling them on for profit. Ticketek, Moshtix and Oztix do not subscribe to this ‘official scalping’, and rightly so. Furthermore, I had purchased tickets to go to Golden Plains a year ago, and couldn’t go, so the festival organised re-selling them via their website, at cost price, which is a great service. If anything, Ticketmaster are encouraging the practice of scapling, and are making money out of the process by taking a cut of these sales. Last year, I purchased tickets to see Guns n’ Roses. I noticed a few days leading up to the official pre-sale, that there was a number of sites that appeared at the top of the web browser, stating that tickets were on sale – out of interest I checked these sites out, and ticket prices were in the $800-$15000 realm. I was shocked, especially considering that I went on to officially purchase ‘diamond’ tickets in general admission, the best tickets that were available; which was a total of $360 each. However, the real issue is that if people are desperate enough to see their favourite artist, and they missed out on the initial sale, they feel like they have no choice. Perhaps this may come down to these international acts not playing in big enough venues or enough shows, or perhaps these re-selling website should be banned in Australia.
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June 2018
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