Why Labour’s Proposals to Ban Ticket Touting don’t go far Enough

Who will spare a thought for StubHub and Viagogo? They are two of the heavyweights of secondary ticketing, with the latter having bought the former in 2019 to gain an even bigger share of the market. They are the places where you can sell tickets for gigs that you can no longer attend. Great. So convenient. They also seem to be places where serially clumsy people, who somehow accidentally and repeatedly buy multiple tickets for a big show but then seconds later realise they cannot attend, can sell their unwanted tickets, often at several times their face value. Great. So convenient. And so lucrative. 

Bad things, apparently, happen in threes – which is why the giants of secondary seek your tears. StubHub launched its IPO in September, but then its stock value fell 21% when it failed to provide a financial forecast for the final quarter of the year. Then the Competition & Markets Authority in the UK said it was investigating several companies, notably StubHub and Viagogo, around “drip pricing and pressure selling”. And now it appears that re-selling of tickets for profit, such as via StubHub and Viagogo, will be banned in the UK, following Ireland’s lead back in 2021 as well as echoing France which banned resale for profit without the express permission of the promoter (anyone who breaches the rule can be fined €15,000). Under the change of law in the UK, resale platforms will not be allowed to hike up their service charges as a stealth move to grow their margins. 

This is all something that the FanFair Alliance has been lobbying to see happen for many years in the UK and something that more artists are increasingly calling out as an egregious activity. Successive UK governments, as they tend to do with anything vaguely “free market” since Thatcherism took grip in the 1980s, raised the occasional eyebrow, shrugged a bit and implied the industry should self-regulate. Now, however, the government is finally moving to make re-selling of tickets for profit illegal. 

According to The Guardian article that broke the news yesterday, “Under the plan, which could form part of next year’s King’s speech, anyone selling a ticket will not be allowed to charge more than they paid for it. Resale platforms will be allowed to charge fees on top of that price. These extras will also be limited, to ensure that they can’t be inflated artificially to offset profits forfeited owing to the legislation. The scale of the ceiling on service fees is yet to be determined.”

It is all still slightly vague in terms of implementation, and resale platforms can still technically operate; but the era of the industrialised tout, with their multiple credit cards and swarms of bots scooping up large numbers of tickets with the express intention of flipping them for significant profits, could finally be coming to an end. Online touting is so advanced that actual fans are elbowed out of the way when digitally queuing for tickets as the professional touts know all the best shortcuts. Fans then have the “option” of being price gouged by resellers. The acts themselves do not get any of the excess revenues being creamed off here by the touts. 

The system as it stood was not only ferociously anti-consumer, it was also rabidly anti-artist. Something had to give.

“Resale platforms will be legally liable if sellers using their site do not comply with the law, which will be enforced by the Competition and Markets Authority,” says The Guardian of the anticipated new legislative changes. 

That’s all good, right? No, it’s going to be absolutely terrible – or at least so claim the resale platforms. “With a price cap on regulated marketplaces, ticket transactions will move to black markets,” a StubHub International spokesperson told The Guardian, presumably with a straight face. It may be the case that sites like StubHub and Viagogo have to exit the UK market. One might, if one was peevishly inclined, be tempted to yell, “Don’t let the door hit your arse on the way out.” 

If only there was an ethical alternative. Oh, there is. Non-profit resale ticketing companies and services do exist. Mobile ticketing company Dice allows buyers to put tickets for sold out gigs back in the pool, and other fans in its Wait List will be alerted to their availability. If they buy them, the original purchaser is refunded the total amount they paid. No one makes obscene profits here, but this system only covers gigs where Dice is a ticketing partner (typically smaller events and not those monopolised by the heavyweight ticketing companies). 

Twickets is another important name here (and was the official resale partner for Oasis), allowing fan-to-fan exchanges, capped at face value or less if the seller is happy to lose a bit of money, with the platform charging a small commission for handling the transaction. For example, two tickets to see Wolf Alice at the Nottingham Motorpoint Arena on 8 December were on Twickets recently for £54 each, with a Twickets fee of £13.02, bringing the total to £121.02. The listing notes that the seller had originally paid a booking fee of £7.50 per ticket, so the Twicket fees are far from excessive. 

Live Nation, owner of Ticketmaster, said the move in the UK was to be applauded. “Ticketmaster already limits all resale in the UK to face value prices, and this is another major step forward for fans – cracking down on exploitative touting to help keep live events accessible,” a company spokesperson told Billboard. “We encourage others around the world to adopt similar fan-first policies.” 

Banning industrialised reselling should, theoretically, make it considerably less fraught for actual fans buying tickets for busy gigs that can sell out in seconds. You will still probably have to jump through multiple verification hoops for access to the biggest events to prove you are a human (as with Radiohead recently), but the intention is to force out the spiv-style touts. If these Arthur Daleys of the laptop cannot re-sell tickets for vastly inflated prices, their morally moribund business model instantly loses its lustre. 

Maybe these nefarious operators will, as StubHub ominously forecasts, ply their dubious trade on the dark web and down other shady online alleyways; but consumers are increasingly wise to sites that give off dodgy vibes. StubHub and Viagogo were able to work as they offered some level of consumer protection if your tickets did not materialise. Perhaps in desperation, some fans will turn to ultra-dodgy sites, but the fact that tickets will not be scooped up in bulk to be re-sold on StubHub, Viagogo and others with brand recognition and online marketing budgets will lessen the problem of tickets being sold to duplicitous operators in the first place. 

Making for-profit ticket reselling illegal is obviously welcome, but sadly it is not a panacea for the increasingly chaotic and frustrating world of ticket buying. There will likely still be dynamic pricing, although Ticketmaster got hauled over the coals after the Oasis ticket sale debacle last year and it now has to be more “transparent” in how this is presented to consumers. You can expect to run into this in the near future, but at least it will be less of a jump-scare and more like the slow and ominous build of the Jaws theme during which you might have enough time to get out of the water. 

Secondary ticketing really only impacts on the biggest acts whose events sell out in minutes. There are plenty of attempts to stop bots scooping up tickets, but this is really only focusing on the top 10% of acts. They may also still avail of dynamic pricing. From a pure consumer perspective, only part of the problem with ticket pricing is being resolved. Maybe, by taking the profiteering touts out of the equation, dynamic pricing may not kick in quite as violently for huge gigs, but it will inevitably remain. 

A nagging question is: why is the UK government saying it is bad if third-parties like organised touts and secondary ticketing platforms scalp fans by selling limited inventory for huge prices but it is absolutely fine for acts and ticketing companies to keep using dynamic pricing as long as they are “transparent” about it?

What we are currently looking at here is a solid fix for an external problem for ticketing companies and touring musicians, but none of it fixes the litany of internal problems. This includes: dynamic pricing; affordability; spiralling extra costs being added onto the ticket price like booking fees (partly a by-product of acts playing ticketing companies off against each other for the lowest cuts so they have to make up the shortfall through handling fees); a 20% VAT rate on all concert tickets; limited inventory as a result of carve-out deals for certain parties, such as O2 Priority customers when shows are at an O2 venue; the steady and insidious introduction of “VIP” ticket packages as a way to financially squeeze customers even more (especially for busy gigs as they are often the only tickets left when the more “affordable” seats are snapped up).

Secondary ticketing might be being brought to heel by the government, but certain parts of primary ticketing are still being allowed to run wild. 

Live music ticket pricing remains fundamentally fractured. What the UK government is doing is a start, but it is not going to make things as “consumer-centric” as they could be. It feels like popping some crowns into a row of snapped and decayed teeth and claiming this is a mouth ready for a Colgate ad.