How to change the secondary ticketing market — Part 1: The Problem
This is the first piece discussing the issue of touting and TicketSwap’s unique approach to making the secondary ticketing market better for fans. Written by TicketSwap UK Market Developer, Daniyal Ahmad.
Today, touting (also known as ‘scalping’ or ‘ticket trading’) is a crucial issue at the heart of the online ticketing market and live events industry. The practice has been labeled ‘parasitic’, ‘pure greed’ and is blamed for draining billions of pounds from the music and entertainment industries around the world. The secondary ticket market should be about providing fans with a safe way to recoup the money they’ve paid for tickets they can no longer use, instead, in its current state, real fans aren’t getting a fair shot at buying tickets and being priced out of attending events altogether.
While it’s definitely important to draw awareness to the practices of touts (scalpers, traders etc) and the online marketplaces that support and profit from them, it’s also vital that we discuss and draw awareness to the solutions that help reduce touting, such as TicketSwap. TicketSwap combats touting by providing fans with a safe, fair and easy alternative for buying and selling spare tickets, without paying over the odds to touts or risking being scammed. Technology has often been at the root of the problem — touts use ‘bots’ to harvest tickets, and hide behind offshore servers and opaque online marketplaces to sell tickets at astronomical prices.
By creating a solution that provides an alternative to touting — a powerful, safe and user-friendly platform that makes buying and selling tickets transparent and fair — TicketSwap is putting technology at the fingertips of real fans that can turn the tide against touts. We’ve decided to put forward our perspective on the issue in a series, starting with Part One: The Problem.
Part One: The Problem
By focusing on solutions and actions that bring fans, artists, music industry professionals and ticketing companies together, we truly believe that we can continue to reduce touting to a level that it is no longer the huge drain on fans or industry professionals. Yet no discussion of the issue would be complete with a clear list of the practices and activities of touts that enrages fans, artists and honest ticketing companies alike. With the large amount of media coverage on the subject, you may already be familiar with the problem but here’s a brief summary of the basics:
Ticket Price: The most visible and visceral aspect of online touting is the price that tickets for sold out events are being offered. Each time a tour is announced for a big name like Ed Sheeran, U2, Drake, Adele or Stormzy, the initial excitement…
…is quickly drowned out by the ensuing outrage as thousands of fans miss out tickets and are forced to consider paying over the odds for tickets. Tickets for in-demand events from megastar artists often receive huge markups (sometimes as high as 1500%) moments after selling out. Moreover, tickets for festivals, club nights and theatre shows that sell out quickly are just as often found on offer at inflated prices on some secondary websites. The prices charged for such tickets generates huge revenue for the websites in the form of hefty service fees (some of which often are more than the original face value of the ticket) and leads to the perverse reality that they have no economic incentive in clamping down on tout activity. Instead, they are rewarding professional touts with preferential treatment and incentives to increase the number of tickets they put on sale.
Bots: Many tickets are ‘harvested’ moments after going on sale by ‘bots’ or scripts that are set up with numerous credit cards details ready to snap up tickets the moment they go on sale. This greatly reduces the chances of a regular fan getting a fair crack at the tickets. We’ve all seen and completed the dreaded “I’m not a robot” captcha on ticketing sites but the truth is the technology is so far advanced that these counter-measures have had only limited success at telling between real fans and bots used by touts.
The bots technology employed by touts is denounced across the ticketing industry and there’s simply too much pressure on lawmakers for them to do nothing about it. In the US, this was addressed late last year by specific Congressional legislation outlawing bots and the UK parliament is currently drafting its own legislation to outlaw and criminalise the use of bots.
Collusion: Despite the progress seemingly being made on banning bots, it seems that this may have only a minor effect on freeing up more tickets for real fans for the simple reason that many tickets never actually go on general sale. They are moved directly from primary ticket sellers and venues directly to the secondary market where they can be sold at price much higher than face value. Many whistleblowers and professional touts have confirmed that deals are struck behind closed doors that earmark thousands of tickets for ticket resale before fans even have a chance to buy them, in return for the organiser (events organiser, venue, artist manager or even in rare cases artists themselves) getting a cut of the resale markup revenue. These deals help explain why the secondary sites often have hundreds tickets on offer before tickets are even on sale to the public.
Transparency: Buying a resold ticket often seems like a leap of faith. Ticket information is often entered incorrectly or not present at all. The original price paid for the ticket is obscured from the buyer and the listed price is often subject to additional service fees. Most importantly, there is little to no information about who the seller is, why they are selling or whether they simply resell tickets for a living, and whether they are reputable and to be trusted. From a government perspective, it is extremely worrying that most of the money generated from these sales goes oversees, undeclared and/or untaxed, which can be used to launder money and fund criminal operations.
Customer Support: Considering the nature of trade that is done on these websites, it is perhaps unsurprising that their customer service record is lousy at best. Tickets are often backed by a guarantee but hundreds of cases of fraud have been reported and are often never resolved. Moreover, tickets sometimes never arrive or are made available for download before the event. All the way, contact lines are unanswered or unreachable.
For customers that have often paid 5 times over face value to be treated with such customer service is a cruel joke and thankfully leads to a lot of one-time customers. For just a glimpse of the despair that this causes among customers, take a look at the latest mentions of Viagogo on Twitter.
Taken together, these shared characteristics of the large majority of resale websites represent a huge problem, not just for the fans that miss out on affordable tickets, but for the music and live entertainment industries as a whole. Yet instead of dwelling on a problem that is already well-documented, our next entries will zero-in on ways the secondary ticket market can become more fan-centric, and how TicketSwap has a huge role to play. We truly believe that 2017 can be the year that we turn the tide against touts.
Next up: Part Two, Crafting the Solution — The TicketSwap Mission.
