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Thursday, 31 January 2013

Sort it tout.

Tickets for The Who in Glasgow available from StubHub UK
one day before they go on general sale.

I'm not the sort of guy who has much change jingling about in my pockets.
I never have been.
Money and me have never really been that close.
It often prefers to spend time in other peoples pockets and bank accounts and steers clear of being seen in my company.

The most I have ever had in savings has been a few hundred quid, and something always comes up that snaffles that away.

It's just the way it has been. I'm not complaining.

For a while now I have been salting some cash away for a rainy day though, but today I thought that I would just throw caution to the wind and buy a couple of tickets to see The Who in the Glasgow SECC.
I love them, and I haven't seen them before, but I wasn't really looking to buy them for myself.
They were going to be a gift for my son.
He loves the whole sixties era, and chances like this don't come around often.
It would have been a great memory for us both.

So at £140 plus a booking fee I wasn't really looking on it as a couple of gigs tickets, but more a night where we could share an experience together.
At that price it's really a tad more than I could afford for a rock show, but like a great deal of parents it's a price I would pay to put a large smile on my sons face and give him a night that would live on forever in his memory.

It doesn't look as if that's going to happen though.

I was aware that presale tickets were made available through Ticket Soup, the official outlet, so I signed up to see if I could get a good seat by getting a jump on all the people who were waiting patiently for the public sale.

I was kidding myself on though.
All that appear to be available are at the fringes.
£70 each to look at the very side of a stage, and get a fraction of the view available elsewhere.
I'm sure people jumped in earlier than me and are sitting quite happily with their tickets already winging their way to them, and that's great.
I have no issue with other fans getting in their early and grabbing a seat, but I'd really like to know how many tickets have went to seatwave, viagogo and the other legalized touts.
Viagogo already have them on sale for £103.98 and Seatwave at £104.95.

A few weeks ago when Pere Ubu tickets went on sale for MONO in Glasgow they were still available for the face price of £18.00 from most outlets, but Viagogo already had one up at £136.
Yes that's right. £118 more than the asking price of a ticket that was still available.

Meanwhile the StubHub will 100% guarantee you a ticket for the Who if you have £198.99 to spare.

Now most of us who consider ourselves music fans are well aware that some of these companies where focussed on by Channel 4s Dispatches, and they were shown to indulge in using multiple credit cards to make multiple bookings, and many more practices that we would consider immoral.

Yet since they were outed for being little more that legitimised touts in February of 2012 what changes have we seen?

Did the government step in and clean them up?
Did the venues attempt to address the problem?
Did any artists come out and emphatically put their foot down?

If you answered no to any of the above then give yourself a gold star.

I'm going to be very frank here.
I'm not so much disappointed as very fuckin' angry.

As ticket prices rise, and most of us on modest incomes are starting to see them creep ever further away from what we can realistically afford, it's a real kick in the teeth to see them be snapped up before a general sale just to reappear with the original price doubled, trebled or more.

I'm not going to give up on taking my son to see The Who, although it is now very doubtful that it will happen, but if I am going to pay an arm and a leg for tickets I'm not going to be handing my hard earned cash over to these bastards, and neither should anyone else.

It just feels criminal.

I'm utterly disgusted.

4 comments:

  1. Couldn't agree more. I've missed out on a few gigs over the last while and find that these chancers are rich with tickets for a good £100+ more than face value.

    Like you say, until venues and artists make a stand more and more of these companies are gonna pop up to take advantage of the fans.

    Perhaps I need to alter my moral compass ... rip off real fans and ensure that I live comfortably on some remote island somewhere.

    Or perhaps not.

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  2. The only way that this can be halted is by people power, but as long as there are those who are willing to pay a hundred or even two hundred pounds, more than the face value then we have no chance of that as no one who is really in a position to do anything about it is, and that includes the artists themselves.

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  3. Target those publications that are ADVERTISING these secondary ticketing co's ..NME, Guardian etc ..evertime they run an article regarding gigs/tickets then fill in the comments section with your views on this. Every little helps.

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  4. Worth reading the latest news about these dreadful touts here.
    http://louderthanwar.com/wilko-johnson-how-online-ticket-resellers-are-trying-to-profit-from-his-terminal-cancer/

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