YES! The Verve are back (after three splits?). They are in the studio and have dates lined up. I can't wait. Shame all the tickets are sold out. Of course, if you pay double they are on ebay. I hate that. I hate that more than majors. That is shameless profiteering at the expense of fans and it disgusts me. I don't care about whether it divides people who can afford it and those that cannot (probably because I fall in the former camp) but I think it is not right for people to profit on things like this. My way to stop it in the future . . .
. . . um sell tickets only at the venue (or 90% only at the venue). Or box office collection only with the correct credit card? That would work.
Anyway, its been so long since I went to a concert, I have booked in to the Kaiser Chiefs tour in December and also plan for a bit of Kula Shaker and maybe even Happy Mondays. Old school I know. I'll get to some new stuff soon I promise.
There’s two kinds of sellers on eBay. Profiteers and regular fans.
Profiteers are scalpers gone digital. They do this as a job. I’m no a big fan of them.
Regular fans are regular fans. Some sell tickets because they were going to go and no longer can. I’ve been this person.
Some because their friends are lame and cancel and leave them sitting with tickets. I’ve been this person too.
And some use the sale of extra tickets to fund them being able to go to the gig. I’ve been this person too.
You just argued that the labels are in business to make a profit. Well eBay is representative of an efficient marketplace in a free market economy. People want to sell and trade. If it’s not eBay it’s gumtree or Craiglist.
Of course the event organisers come down on eBay all the time for this. And they could stop the problem, but requires spending money which they don’t want to do.
They could accept returns and offer refunds. And then resell the tickets at face value. But that means they could land up with unsold seats so they are loath to do that.
They could develop ways to limit tickets but that’s prohibits large groups of people going which hurts their market.
What they need to do is allow genuine fans to return and trade tickets, but again they don’t care they care about their own profit. The reason the even organisers don’t like eBay is that they aren’t getting a cut of the resales.
They could also ditch the ridiculous fees ticket master charges on top of everything which also doesn’t help fans. Like £2 to print your own fucking ticket.
I’m not having a go at ebay, its the people selling tickets on ebay one minute after they have bought them for double the price. i.e. these are not people who genuinely bought an extra ticket for a friend who can no longer go (well a very small fraction may have got a ticket then called up a friend who said, the VERVE? I thought you said Trapped Nerve).
A decent % of the people on eBay (and this applies to sports as well) have a few extra tickets, or bought the tickets to subsidise their own, or friends backed out (e.g. Ross)
When something is hard to get or in demand, it creates a free market to trade them.
I am not a big fan of touts myself. But I’d rather it was on eBay than outside the venue, where it really is scummy people.
As I said, this could easily be stopped by event organisers creating a way for fans to legitimately return tickets. but they don’t.
Of course, I managed to get some tickets off ebay for a 30% premium. Still, I lost my original bid which was at a 100% premium. So I’m happy now!