In honour of Ticket Touting

Suppose a show venue or stadium can seat 5,000 people for a unique event but the demand is 20,000; obviously not every-one can be accommodated. Events such as cup finals, major tennis tournaments and so on are often sold out, often in advance. For an usual tennis fan it is just about not possible to get a ticket for Wimbledon,
surely a centre court ticket or a ticket for one of the more valued matches. Which means that whatever way you look at it, there are going to be a lot of disap-
pointed fans. How then is it to be decided who will be disappointed and who will not?

The simple answer is that the fans who are prepared to use the most money will not be disappointed, which means that if a ticket for concert is £20 and a
fan is ready to pay £100, to a tout or anyone else, then he will see event, while a fan who is not prepared to shell out that sort of money will not. Exploitation of what? Well, the box office sold the ticket for a mere twenty pounds so the tout has made eighty pounds. Fine, then why didn’t the club sell the ticket for £100 in the first place? We have often heard of tickets for the men’s final at Wim-bledon changing hands for a £1,000 or more. If this is the going rate then the club should raise the price of
centre court tickets to a thousand pounds or something in that region.. From a socialist point of view they should welcome the tout — the small man — making a profit rather than the big corporations.

Is to become Ticket Tout an easy

The modern concert is going experience is ripe for exploitation. We kid ourselves that tickets at over-inflated prices stand for value for money, and on the night we queue for hours to buy sparkling lager at £3.50 a pint and take our seats in a different postcode from the stage.

All that we can just about live with. But the new phenomenon of gigs selling out almost immediately, only for tickets to reappear on eBay and other sites at overcharge prices, has driven many a music fan to the brink.

It is also the name of his website, which allows ethically-minded gig-goers to trade tickets without take advantage of each other. 'It's what you see just before you murder someone in a fit of passion,' he continues. 'When I set the site up I was really angry.'

The service models itself on a dating agency for music fans who are prepared to resell tickets at face value by 'introducing' prospective buyers to sellers. It readily admits that that it is 'not totally safe'.

'We don't know who you're dealing with. We cannot offer any assurances,' explains Marks. 'But then, if you buy tickets from unofficial sources, that is always the case.'

Rory, a 31-year-old accountant, has successfully bought Coldplay tickets and sold ones for Bright Eyes over the past few months.

'We acknowledge the problems that people have in getting rid of tickets that they can't use and the idea of being able to pass them on at the original price is good,' says Star spokesman Jonathan Brown.

Star is lobbying the government to restrict the resale of concert tickets. The problem is 'out of control' because of the internet, says Brown.

The internet has become 'the virtual path for a new generation of touts, reports Alex Needham, deputy editor of the music weekly NME

'More and more fans are desperate to see gigs, demand far outstrips supply and the economics of that means that it is ready for exploitation.'

Chances of getting Olympics Tickets

It depends totally on in which event are you interested in. Athletics finals, swimming and track cycling will be particularly over-subscribed but at the other end of the scale tickets for the handball or taekwondo qualifiers will prove hard to shift. Games chiefs have divided some events into many sessions, boosting your chances of a ticket. In spite of all those chance if you will fail to get Olympics tickets. . . or you can deal with the touts. It is the only best solution.

Theatre tickets: are we being scammed?

An email pinged into my inbox the other day from the Office of Fair Trading, announcing the launch of a new campaign warning West Endtheatregoers to watch out for online ticketing scams.

The Just Tick it campaign (not sure Nike is going to like that much) onthe OFT's website Consumer Direct claims that scam artists are selling non-existent seats for West End shows, leaving unwitting fans about £60 out of pocket and without a ticket.

Michele Shambrook, operations manager at Consumer Direct, is quoted as saying: "The current theatre boom means that more people than ever are going to watch shows, and with the West End alone staging over 50 productions during the summer months, it's not a surprise that the ticket scammers are out in force.

"These scammers are extremely sophisticated. The Just Tick it campaign wants to ensure that people buying tickets to events don't lose money and miss out. It's very easy to be tempted by cheap online offers or websites that say they have tickets to sold-out shows, but remember that if it looks too good to be true, it probably is."

The thing is, though (and if you'll excuse the play on words): I don't buy it. I have never come across a single theatregoer who has been sold a fake theatre ticket online and I've never heard from a single producer or theatre owner that it's a real problem. Certainly, I've heard of online scams for pop concerts, music festivals and sports events, but never for theatre.

I spoke to a ticket agent about this and he confirmed my suspicions. There just isn't the demand. As a fraudster, there's very little point in selling fake theatre tickets on the web because you can't sell them quickly at high enough prices, or in enough bulk, to turn a quick profit and disappear. Certainly not compared with other types of live event. After all, for most West End shows, it's not too hard to lay your hands on a ticket at some point in the run, whereas music concerts have much more limited engagements; and sporting events, of course, are one-offs.

That's not to say there aren't "scams" in theatre. It's just that, for the most part, they sail carefully on the right side of the law. It's not fraud, more sharp practice. There are the traditional touts who sell tickets at inflated prices or websites that offer expensive tickets you could find much cheaper elsewhere.

Very occasionally, when you do have a theatre event for which demand outstrips supply – say for David Tennant in Hamlet), you'll have online touts buying up tickets and selling them on at a huge profit. It's still not really a scam, though, just capitalism at work.

Perhaps more suspiciously – although again perfectly legally – there are the websites with addresses that make them sound like the official website of the theatre in which the show is taking place but are in fact ticket agents selling at marked-up prices. Somewhere in the small print at the bottom of the page, there will be a line making this clear.

Aside from that, I think, theatre is thankfully pretty scam-free, especially when compared with the music industry.

But then again, maybe I've been lucky. What have your experiences been? Is there a vast army of online theatre scammers out there – as the OFT appear to think – who have simply passed me by?

Tickets are legal to resale on its face value

That's the obvious conclusion to be drawn from a recent incident in which a ten-year-old Stoke City fan was convicted to the police by the club secretary for trying to sell a ticket for a match he couldn't attend via an advert in the local paper. The ticket was worth £11, he was asking £7.

It seems that a lot of fans still don't know about the requirements of the Criminal Justice Act that can be applied to football spectators, and are suffering as a result.

The new laws have been used to justify the arrest and conviction of fans who are clearly not touts, caught trying to sell on their own tickets at cost price. Two recent incidents exemplify the problem.

Ticket Resale

Ticket resale is the act of reselling tickets for admission to events. Tickets are bought from official sellers and are then sold for a price determined by the individual or company in possession of the tickets. Tickets sold through secondary sources may be sold for less or more than their face value depending on demand, which itself tends to vary as the event date approaches. When the supply of tickets for a given event available through authorized ticket sellers is depleted, the event is considered "sold out", commonly booming the market value for any tickets on offer through secondary sellers.

Why does generally touting happen?

Getting tickets to your see your favourite music star, go to a festival or even a musical is very hard these days and often it goes without saying that getting your hands on some tickets will not be easy.
Try to get them on the phone and you will find yourself pressing ‘redial’ until your finger aches, only to get through and find they have sold out. Websites seem to crash or become really slow under massive demand.
So if it’s so hard to get tickets, aren’t touts a good thing?

Touting is only possible because of the huge demand for tickets which means the price of the supply can be pushed up. However it is largely the ticket touts themselves that are pushing the prices up by the very act of touting. By buying a huge number of tickets they make it harder for people to get tickets through the normal means, making it necessary to go to touts.
The cost of tickets also means that they are becoming beyond the price range of ordinary fans who just want to pay normal prices to see their favourite band or attend an event.