Beware the ticketing nightmare

It won't come as a great surprise to the majority of people to be reminded that many music fans are getting seriously ripped off in the ticket market. The Department of Culture, Media and Sport are having meetings with the industry with a stated aim of improving things for fans but whether this will have any real impact on the end user - the customer like you and I - remains to be seen. Link here to their various reports

There has been a very worrying development recently - Ticketmaster - one of the legitimate ticket outlets, has been auctioning tickets on their website, whilst this is probably not illegal it most certainly is of concern coming at a time when there are efforts to ensure that fans are able to buy their tickets at proper face value, quite what the difference is between this new practice by legitimate ticket outlets and e-bay is anybody's guess, but we certainly don't feel comfortable with anyone selling tickets above face value, this looks as though it might be seen by legitimate outlets as the way forward and if you do buy from a legitimate outlet you WILL get your tickets. But are on line auctions the only way forward for the most popular tickets?

Last year (2006) and after many guest appearances on BBC's Watchdog head of the ticket touts Michael Rangos was briefly put out of business when officials shut down GetMeTickets.com - an outfit owned and operated by Mr Rangos - a sigh of relief was heard.

But this might just be a short lived sense of relief with the arrival of a new website: tickttout.com which went into liquidation on March 6th leaving thousands of customers seriously out of pocket and without their tickets - see the report written in The Guardian

There are other sites out there that are secondary ticket outlets (these buy tickets from ticket agencies and then resell them to customers) that are run by companies that are not registered in the UK:

londonticketmarket.com - the company that runs this website is registered in Cyprus
londonticketshop.co.uk - is registered in Hungary

There are unsubstantiated allegations that Mr Rangos has involvement with these sites - we do not know if this is accurate or not and legally could not say - but what we do know is that if a company is registered outside the UK then it is not subject to the same law as other UK registered companies.

BBC report here

The Mirror has reported on tickettout - link here

The Guardian has also reported the story - link here

The Financial Times - link here

Report from the Dept Culture,Media and Sport - link here

The Administrators Notice board re Ticket Tout - link here

On the 6th December 2006 Krystal Box Office was also criticised by BBC Watchdog who highlighted a number of customers who had bought tickets and not received what they had bought, having paid well over the odds many customers were left seriously out of pocket. BBC report here

We've all got used to the e-bay scenario - as have the touts who thanks to ebay are able to fully function as a business and make a lot of money with great ease. Aside from all the usual moral arguments about e-bay fans are certainly NOT very well protected and have little recourse when things go wrong - as they often do.

In a very worrying development it appears that a legitimate ticket outlet may have jumped on the 'we can sell them for more than face value' bandwagon as we said earlier, this may well set a precedent and could result in other legitimate ticket outlets also jumping on what is obviously perceived as a very lucrative market.

The Office of Fair Trading have a couple of reports into ticketing. Given the controversy about ticketing and ticket touts it's quite interesting to have a look at the first report written in 2005. Ticket agents in the UK report (pdf 447 kb) and annexes (pdf 753 kb) . There is also a basic consumer advice document for people buying tickets. Questions for consumers to consider when buying tickets (pdf 60 kb)