If you’re a music lover, you’ve probably experienced this scenario lots of times: you wake up early in the morning to see if tickets are on sale to see your favourite musician, but after searching for tickets, you find that they’re all sold out. The reason? Ticket touts. They have been around for decades, and while touts or scalpers still frequent concert venues to sell tickets at a huge markup, others go on resell websites to sell their tickets to fans.
According to a report, a tout can earn as much as £12,500 profit if he buys £50,000 worth of tickets. Not convinced? Consider the fact that in July 2016, Beyonce had a concert at Wembley Stadium, and tickets cost £50 at face value. But on a resell website, the ticket was marked up to a staggering £825. As tickets are sold out, fans who are eager to see their favourite artists have no choice but to spend more than what they anticipated just to see and hear their beloved singer live. While ticket touting can hurt a music lover’s wallet, it can also directly affect the music industry in many ways.
It hurts the musician’s revenue
As Google has started policing ticket resellers, musicians are also taking a stand against the predatory actions of touts and ticket resellers. Some artists have even openly encouraged their fans to stop using secondary platforms to buy tickets to their concerts. It’s important to know that buying tickets from scalpers can hurt a musician’s revenue as they don’t earn a lot of money from album sales as they have to split that with their music producers, label, and management. Musicians get paid and earn money at concerts, where fans pay to see them perform. This is why some artists are left with no choice but to take matters into their own hands by selling paperless tickets or doing slow ticketing to fight off bots and scalpers who try to manipulate the queue and buy tickets in bulk.
It keeps fans out of concerts
Buying tickets for a concert is an emotional experience for true fans, and scalpers are aware of this fact. Touts count on a fan’s emotional vulnerability so they can prey on them. They are experts at zeroing in on the most frustrated people at venues. If you have the cash, then you get to support your favourite artist in person. If not, then you go home feeling frustrated and disappointed. Live music experiences are supposed to be a unifying experience, but scalpers are turning concerts into more divisive and less accessible events. Not only does touting keep true fans out of concerts, but it takes the joy out of a beautiful experience.
Courtesy of Sally Collins.
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