Touts flaunt online wad in face of credit crunch

By Rik Salmon

 

Ticket touting is nothing new.  For gig goers, the image of a scraggly man, unshaven and riddled with cockney colloquialisms, lurking outside the venue and barking obscene prices is as common as pints in plastic cups and sweaty chairs.  But while we all frown on them, touts can serve a purpose – and you can’t help but slightly admire their entrepreneurial nous.

 

However, the birth of the internet and eBay in particular has seen touting develop far beyond the pavement and into a genuinely lucrative industry.  Things reached a tipping point a couple of years ago when the government responded to campaigns from the NME and began discussing the possibility of making the process illegal, and Glastonbury organiser Michael Eavis instigated a new ticketing policy that proved extremely successful in eradicating touting at his festival.

 

Yet despite these efforts, this week has seen the launch of a new secondary ticketing subsidiary of Play.com.  It’s essentially the same as touting on eBay, but with slight differences – namely the 15% commission Play.com takes from each sale.  According to the marketing blurb, the service is “based around offering value” – yet at one point this week, two tickets to go and see Kings of Leon were up for £675.59.  If that isn’t ridiculous enough, there are various ‘retailers’ on the site asking for over £100 for tickets that haven’t even sold out.

 

But Play.com isn’t alone.  Ticketmaster has also seen the potential in ripping people off, and launched GetMeIn.com, its own stab at creating a secondary ticket market populated exclusively by idiots.  Recently, £90 on GetMeIn.com would get you a ‘premium’ package to see Oasis, which included a ticket (retailed at £38), a tote bag (readily on sale at the merch stall) as well as a £10 voucher for the Oasis online store. 

 

This raises some important questions.  Firstly, what kind of person wants an Oasis tote bag?  Secondly, what happened to the credit crunch?

 

According to CNN, this is no longer a mere crunch, or even a crisis, but we are now firmly in the midst of a credit ‘quake’, so is this really the best time for companies to be launching services that sell products for up to 2,000% of their retail price?  Regardless of what’s happening over in Iceland and maybe now even Switzerland, you know the world is truly on its knees when people are happy to pay £100 to see the bloody Ting Tings.