Comment: Is the tide turning against ticket touts? Published on: 17 August 2018 Writing for The Conversation, Dr Adam Behr discusses changes in the secondary selling market. , As Dylan sang: 鈥淵ou don鈥檛 need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.鈥� Ticketmaster appears not to, anyway, given the news that it will be closing its resale sites Seatwave and GetMeIn in Europe . It will be replacing them with a fan exchange facility within the main website that caps ticket prices at face value plus 15% or lower, . Ticketmaster is a global company, and live music a transnational concern, so developments in one territory can feed into wider trends. But, while the 鈥渟econdary market鈥� has attracted increasing attention of late, reselling tickets 鈥� often at swingeing mark-ups that can price fans out of the market 鈥� is neither new nor straightforward. 鈥淭icket touting,鈥� to use a more derogatory term, has long accompanied live events. As far back as the , impresarios complained of subscriptions to concert series being broken up into individual tickets then sold on for profit via booksellers and newspaper advertisements. The issue has also long been entangled with the broader question of access to culture. In 1881, when the Boston Symphony Orchestra priced some tickets , cheap even for the time, to widen audiences for its subscription series, touts bought them up and sold them on at prices that were beyond affordable levels for the very people they were aimed at. The secondary market, of course, grew wings with the internet. An activity that had hitherto largely been confined to operators selling tickets outside venues became massively scaled-up and normalised. Electronic ticket purchases and the rise of e-commerce sites such as eBay now allowed 鈥渂edroom touts鈥� to scoop up and resell tickets from home. A long regulatory road Official interest in the UK initially grew from concerns about fraudulent websites and the fees charged by primary agents such as Ticketmaster, which facilitate the process of selling tickets across a tour to customers in numerous locations. In 2005, the Office of Fair Trading published a on ticket agents in the UK but concluded that secondary sellers provided a useful function and recommended more stringent application of existing laws to combat fake tickets or misleading information about the face value of the ticket. A 2007 inquiry into touts likewise baulked at additional legislation, despite vehement condemnations of secondary sites by the Concert Promoters Association. With the trade developing apace 鈥� and money draining from the primary market 鈥� Ticketmaster took matters into its own hands in 2008 and, subsequently, Seatwave. This blurred the boundaries between primary and secondary sellers. The waters were muddied further when Ticketmaster with concert promotion giant Live Nation in 2010. Tickets for some plays can sell for way above face value. The attempt by the MP for Washington and Sunderland West, Sharon Hodgson, to put a legislative cap of 10% on resale mark-ups was thwarted when her bill was . But the tide started turning when Hodgson and other concerned parliamentarians piggybacked stipulations mandating transparency about the location and identity of the vendor for resold tickets onto the 2015 Consumer Rights Act. This also prompted the government to commission , which noted the difficulties of disentangling the primary and secondary markets, not least that consumers were often ill-equipped to distinguish between them. Renewed interest, and campaigning by the , which had some industry support, helped drive a more robust approach. The outlawed the use of bots to circumvent promoters鈥� restrictions on purchasing large numbers of tickets to resell. Artists and promoters also started pushing back more forcefully. After tickets for Ed Sheeran鈥檚 charity gig in aid of teenage cancer victims appeared on resale site Viagogo, cancelled tickets for his stadium tour that they had identified as touted and assisted fans who had purchased them to obtain refunds. More than 拢240,000 was returned to those with invalidated tickets. Markets and cultural value So, will the now burgeoning 鈥渇an-to-fan鈥� model fix the problem? Complications abound. 鈥淟ive music鈥� is not a unified market, for a start, and a 鈥渙ne-size-fits-all鈥� solution may be difficult to implement. What works for Glastonbury, for example, may not work for small local venues. Tickets for small, grassroots events, for instance, are less prone to being touted than big names, who are more or less guaranteed to sell out. There is also the technical matter of touts paying for preferential rankings on the , which will be many fans鈥� first port of call. Then there鈥檚 the international nature of the internet marketplace. Even if Seatwave and GetMeIn complied with recent legislation, others 鈥� such as Viagogo, 鈥� have resisted, to the point where its UK office last year by the Competition and Markets Authority. An underlying question is what the market value of a ticket is in the first place. If people are prepared to pay such large sums to touts for top-tier tickets, are they underpriced in the first place? Again, multiple factors are at play. Artists, unwilling to be thought of as wringing the maximum financial outlay from their fans, will want to develop an audience over the long term. Because of course, these events are experiences, with . This is what underpins concerns about hugely inflated prices locking those without deep pockets out of access to events. Ticketmaster鈥檚 move may be partly market-driven. Competitors such as AXS and Eventim run 鈥渇an-to-fan鈥�, price-capped models. It could also be bending with the regulatory wind. Closer attention to the secondary market in the UK comes alongside a on resale prices. But even if there is an element of PR in play, it still shows that campaigning and the political climate can help shape the market, even shy of an outright legal ban on touting. Perhaps these industry and political developments suggest that greater attention is being paid to the 鈥溾�� of live music 鈥� the emotional and social benefits at the heart of the experience. Tickets provide access to these, and so are more than just straightforward commodities for financial exchange. If that access is to be protected, then such attention is a step in the right direction. , Lecturer in Popular and Contemporary Music, This article was originally published on . Read the . Share: Latest News 缅北禁地 recognised with geography award 缅北禁地 has been awarded the Highly Commended Geographical Association Publishers Award for its collaboration with Time for Geography, the UK鈥檚 open-access, dedicated video platform. published on: 16 April 2026 缅北禁地 historians mark General Strike centenary To mark the 100th anniversary of the British General Strike and miners鈥� lock-out of 1926, historians at 缅北禁地 are organising a series of events on its enduring legacy. published on: 16 April 2026 Comment: NCP is in administration Writing for The Conversation, Erwei (David) Xiang discusses how some big companies like NCP are so dependent on debt that they can鈥檛 adjust to change. published on: 16 April 2026 Facts and figures
![缅北禁地 logo](/gomobileassets/img/logo.svg" "缅北禁地"){kind=logo}