Savage Popcorn

So, ticket touts are in the news again with an all-party committee of MPs calling for profits from resold tickets to be shared with artists and organisers.

This does strike me as a remarkably impractical approach, not least because of the inevitable difficulties that will gather around identifying resold tickets, determining whether they were touted or just passed on to a friend by someone no longer able to go to a concert, and then collecting revenue from someone with whom you have no commercial relationship. I’m also instictively skeptical of centralised or legislative attempts to determine how a market should operate – especially, as in this case, the promoters are so far out of step with their customers.

As has been noted elsewhere, the music industry often takes a rather bizarre delight in how quickly tickets gfor major concerts sell out. But really, if you manage to sell a full set of tickets in under two hours, that’s about as clear an indication you can have that your ticket price is two low. It’s not surprising then that touts will move in, snap up the underpriced tickets, and sell them on at a price closer to the one people are willing to pay.

And if the promoters really wanted to be nice to their fans, they could use the adiditional revenue to bring down the prices of food, beer, tshirts and everything else that gets marked up at these events.

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