10 May Ticket Resale Rip Off
Written by Ashley Gummerson
The concert industry in the United Kingdom is a multi-billion dollar industry. With so many people wanting to go to concerts, tickets quickly sell out. But are the tickets just going to directly to the fans initially? Although some fans are lucky enough to buy tickets right off of the official concert site, many more fans have to go to resale websites in order to get the tickets they want. Over the past decade, the ticket resale industry has been on the rise. Some resellers such as Stubhub which started in 2000, don’t have ticket pricing regulations, which means that a seller can set a ticket price to thousands of dollars. Even though the IRS has a regulation on how much money a seller can make on Stubhub, that doesn’t mean that sellers cannot use various sites online to sell. In addition to insanely high ticket prices, some original sellers such as Ticketmaster, AXS and official venue websites can not regulate whether their tickets are being resold. Although expensive ticket resale is a large issue in the concert industry, many musicians are teaming up with ethical ticket reselling companies that resell tickets for face value. Small changes like this can seriously change the resale industry. As well as being sold over priced tickets, there is also a sector of the resale industry that sells fake tickets and sells multiple versions of the same tickets. There needs to be a way to protect fans from being ripped off and being cheated out of tickets.
UK Creative Industries data shows that in 2016, the total audience for live music in the UK was 27.7m with 24m attending concerts and 3.7m going to music festivals. With millions of people attending concerts in the UK every year, tickets are bound to sell out quite quickly and because the market for tickets is so fierce, those who do ticket resale know their is a market for them. Dan Howser sells tickets via StubHub and Get Me In for the past 4 years. “This has turned into my full time job. When I know that a popular artist is coming to the Bay Area, I will buy as many tickets as I can from different computers and I resell whichever ones I end up getting,” Howser states. Stubhub does not have any regulations against how much a ticket can be resold for. They are simply there to get someone tickets. Howser explains that the most money he has ever made on a single Stubhub ticket resale is “$700, when Beyonce was in town. Everyone wanted tickets to that show and they sold out in minutes. I managed to buy 3 and sold them all.” Many people believe that resellers are just cheating the system and selling the tickets for their own gain, not selling them for the fans. To this Howser states, “I don’t feel bad reselling tickets at all. This is my job. And at least I’m guarrenting people a safe way to buy tickets and I’m not scamming them like people on Craigslist can.” Thousands of people around the world resell tickets, and they are the main reason why tickets will sell out so quickly from official sites. Resellers will sell tickets for large amounts because they want to make a profit.
High resale prices should be monitored by the resale websites themselves but because there are so many tickets being bought and sold, it can be hard to keep track. Leslie Greene* (named changed in order to protect identity) has worked at Stubhub for over 10 years and states that she has seen her fair share of ripoffs happening. “We have hundreds of thousands of people using Stubhub, and with so many people and listings, it’s almost impossible for us to see everything that is going on,” Greene states. Once the tickets are out of the hands of the original seller on official websites, they no longer have any control over where the tickets go and once this happens, the fans no longer have protection from being ripped off. “As of January 1, 2011, IRS regulations require all businesses that process payments to file a Form 1099-K report for all sellers with more than 200 transactions and where gross payments to them by StubHub exceed $20,000.”. Although the IRS has created regulations on how much a person can make yearly on resale tickets without being looked at, fans still have no protection because of the fact that there is no regulations on single ticket prices and that doesn’t mean that every seller will get stopped by the IRS. “There are some companies that hire people to buy as many tickets as they possibly can when tickets go onsale for a big show. And we are able to tell, because when a single account puts up 40 tickets at a time, there is no way that one person on one computer can be doing that.” Yet, even though these things are happening, Stubhub has no regulation against this as long as there is not over 200 transactions happening. Issues like this has caused Stubhub’s reputation online to be horrible. Consumer Affairs users rated Stubhub under 2 stars due to the various scams and insane ticket prices. Various stories scatter the page such a some people’s tickets never being delivered, some people being sold fake tickets, and most of all, very expensive overpriced tickets.
Insane ticket reselling is no secret to the actual artists as well, especially now that social media is so prevalent. Musicians such as Ed Sheeran, Adele, One Direction and Lady Gaga have had some of their tickets resold for thousands of dollars online. Ed Sheeran found out on Twitter this year that the problem was getting even worse after fans stated they there weren’t able to afford going to his shows because of the crazy prices. A representative for the singer stated to the BBC, “We are vehemently opposed to the unethical practices that occur in the secondary market. We have written to each of our partners, be they promoters, venues or ticketing companies detailing the way in which we expect tickets to be sold: direct to fans.” They are now partnering with UK ticket resale website Twickets that is the first website to only allow tickets to be bought and sold at face value or less. Unlike Stubhub, Twickets protects the fans. Not only has Ed Sheeran started partnering with the company but so have bands like 5 Seconds Of Summer, Mumford & Sons, and The 1975, among others. Twickets being a smaller company has a lot more of a watch over the tickets being bought and sold, so the fans are more protected than if they were to buy from more popular ticket resale companies.
Ticket resale is not the only cause of some ripoffs towards fans. Fake tickets are sold every day as well as duplicated tickets. Concert go-er Hannah Wilson was sold a duplicate ticket for a Taylor Swift concert a few years ago. “I bought the ticket on GetMeIn at a pretty reasonable price and was sent it quite quickly. I was waiting in line at the venue and when they scanned my ticket, it bounced and they told me according to the system, I was already inside. At that moment, I knew I had been scammed and I was shocked,” Wilson explains. She later came to find out after talking to willcall and security that this had happened to 10 other people with the exact same ticket. The seller sold 10 copies of the same original ticket, so whoever was the first one to show up was the person that got into the concert. Ticket sale websites and concert venues need to find a way to work together in protecting the fans and regulating the system. But once the tickets are sold from the official website, when they are put onto another second party website, there is no longer a protection coverage.
Although some fair resale ticket websites are being created, the only way a buyer is guaranteed the original price of a concert ticket is if they buy it from the original source. There are countless stories of fans being ripped off and cheated out of tickets on resale websites. More regulations need to be created for buying and selling tickets on resale websites to protect them from having to pay extortionate prices on concert tickets and to make sure that no one is ever being sold a fake or duplicate ticket. Although ticket resale is a useful idea, it needs to be regulated.
