Culture

Concert Ticket Resales: Pay Us Twice

by Jordan Yerman | December 5, 2007 at 08:41 am

599 views | 5 Recommendations | 3 comments

Reps of more than 400 performing artists, including Robbie Williams, KT Tunstall and Radiohead, have banded together to create the Resale Rights Society, which aims to license the unregulated secondary ticketing market.

Initiative was launched Tuesday in London by the Music Managers Forum.

The Resale Rights Society aims to ensure music fans are protected from unscrupulous or bogus resellers by introducing a scheme to validate sales on ticketing sites. It also wants to ensure that artists and the live music industry share in the proceeds of resold tickets. It will approach websites including eBay, Viagogo, Seat Exchange, Seatwave and GetMeIn.

This seems a bit silly: once a good is sold, the contract between buyer and seller is executed: done and done. Nobody would expect Toyota to get a cut when you sell your 1980 Corolla to your neighbor, right? Those in the music industry must understand that ticket resale has been around since there was such a thing as concert tickets. The real enemy of the music industry is not piracy or resale or download or any of that stuff. The enemy is choice. You can go online (or to your local music club) and hear any number of new bands perform. Labels and artists alienate their fans at their peril.

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liamssoft

flagged this story as Good Stuff

at 09:10 on December 5th, 2007

jordan, I think this is aimed at curbing the people who buy tickets in order to resell them at a profit and have no intention of using the tickets themselves.. Good stuff.

infomatique

at 03:11 on December 6th, 2007

Liamssoft you are correct, but getting a percentage of the profit from a transaction that you disapprove of is a very strange and self-serving approach.
Also I must admit that I find it a bit difficult to get excited about people re-selling tickets especially as ticket agents charge a commission plus additional charges for using credit cards.
Question - will they refund the "tax" when a performance is canceled?
There is a long history of the music industry trying to get revenue for doing nothing, one example being an attempt to get a levy put on blank tapes (the assumption being that all blank tapes were used to copy copyright material).

Big Sparky (not verified)

at 14:23 on April 28th, 2009

I do not believe the old ticket sellers have a right to nothing...zero...Once you sell something ...poof its gone ...like you give it to someone and you stand there aghast while they destroy it right in front of you...Nay I say...they have a right to all of it after you give it to them...But when you SELL something you give it up forever...even the emotion of it is theirs...forever...or am I yakking out of the side of my neck...?We will call the Resale Rights Society a bunch of hot dog water...as they are useless greedy grabbers of days gone by...as in BYE...Sparky...