Harvey Goldsmith: Ticket re-sale websites 'a national disgrace'

Goldsmith has staged concerts for the likes of Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen and Diana Ross

Concert promoter Harvey Goldsmith has called secondary ticketing websites "a national disgrace".

He said tickets to U2's recent London shows were advertised for up to £3,300 on resale sites, despite a face value of £182.

"We're asking the government to pass a law which says you cannot sell a ticket for more than 10% of its face value," he told Radio 4's Front Row.

The government is running a public consultation on secondary ticketing.

Fans have until Friday, 20 November to submit their views on the issue.

Goldsmith's comments come a week after rock star Prince postponed the sale of tickets to his European tour over concerns about tickets being resold on third-party websites.

He later pulled the tour in the wake of the terror attacks in France.

Earlier this month, consumer magazine Which? called for a crack-down on ticket resale sites, arguing consumers face a "stitch-up".

The group spent eight weeks monitoring four of the biggest secondary ticketing websites and said it found "some really unusual behaviour".

"We found things like tickets appearing on resale websites before they were even officially released," report author Peter Moorey told Front Row.

"And we found tickets that were appearing simultaneously on the primary and the resale websites, as soon as tickets went on sale."

The magazine also found that resale restrictions - such as the requirement to show photo ID at the venue - were not being disclosed.

"This is really worrying," said Mori, "because people could go onto these resale websites, spend as much as £1,500, then go to the venue and be turned away."

Market 'distorted'

Paul Reed, general manager of the Association of Independent Festivals said he felt fans were being "defrauded" by sites that sell tickets at vastly inflated prices.

He said some of the association's members - which include events such as Sonisphere, The Secret Garden Party and The Eden Sessions - had encountered fans buying fake tickets online.

"We had an event this year where 27 people bought tickets on a secondary platform. They showed up at the festival - and the secondary ticketing platform had essentially facilitated the sale of a piece of paper. It wasn't worth anything," he told the BBC.

"The secondary platforms weren't contactable, they weren't accountable. But these tickets were fraudulent."

Prince has protested at ticket resellers, calling them "vultures"

"I don't think parasitic is too strong a word for the secondary ticketing industry. Our view is that this is an industry that's been allowed to grow on the back of the creative arts without reinvesting anything into it."

"We're all dependent on genuine fans and if they're constantly banging their head off a wall trying to get a ticket, they're going to give up."

Phil Hutcheon, who runs the ticketing website Dice, told the BBC that, in his previous career as a manager, he had seen his artists' tickets appear on secondary sites "either before the concert's gone on sale or literally seconds afterwards".

"Then we asked questions about it and they disappear."

He called for more transparency from resale sites, with more information about who is listing tickets for sale.

"We don't want to stop people re-selling tickets," he insisted. "There's lots of situations where fans can't make a show and want to pass the tickets on to another fan.

"Our thing is that, when someone is buying dozens or thousands of tickets and reselling them and distorting the market, that's a real issue. And they can get away with it because no-one knows who's doing it."

Dice sells tickets with no booking fee, with the passes stored in an app, ready to be scanned at the venue. It also allows fans to return tickets if they cannot make a show. These are then put back on sale at the original face value.

"This isn't an attack on big business," said Hutcheon. "We just want something that's more transparent and fair for fans."

Guarantees

In response to the Which? report last week, ticketing site StubHub said it was "committed to transparency".

"It is very clear in our terms and conditions that sellers are not permitted to list or sell tickets that they do not own or that have not been allocated to them, known as speculative selling.

"If we are made aware of speculative selling on our site for specific events, we will investigate and remove the listings where appropriate.

"However, there are many cases where fans will have access to priority tickets in advance of an official on-sale and this is one reason why tickets can be listed so quickly."

Meanwhile Ticketmaster, which owns Get Me In and Seatwave, said the resale market in the UK had "developed high levels of consumer protection over recent years, with incidents of fraud being very rare."

"Ticketmaster's resale marketplaces, Get Me In and Seatwave, offer fans full consumer protection, with guarantees of full refund or ticket replacement," the statement continued.