Let them all tout

[addedentry]

It is clear that many die-hard fans are willing to pay high prices to share the same air as their heroes. The result is that many of the most popular events are selling out more quickly than ever, and, all too often, it is the genuine fans who are being squeezed out.
[The Guardian on touting, 21 June]

Die-hard fans spoiling it for genuine fans there

Comments

[the_heiress]

I applaud the first entrepreneurs/touts who realised they could buy tickets early and gamble on getting a higher price for them later. I like the element of negotiation between buyer and seller. I don't like organisations who buy hundreds of tickets and then set the prices sky high. There's no opportunity for negotiation. Where's the fun in that?

I suppose I'm saying everyone should live their lives like a gentleman, whether they're socialist or capitalist.

[addedentry]

Amen to that! I shall start to require a better standard of attire from the gentlemen thieves entrepreneurs outside the Oxford Academy.

[jiggery_pokery]

Culturally, if it's a bling-laden gangsta rapper whose concert you intend to attend, I would thoroughly advocate the auction-only approach, possibly with the incentive of premium seating with valet service so that, for a price, the audience might enjoy a taste of the moneyed lifestyle.

However, an auction-only approach for distributing tickets to a concert given by crusty leftie punx would just be wrong.

[qatsi]

I thought £18 for standing tickets for Taraf de Haïdouks at the Cheltenham Festival was expensive, but that's because I am used to Promming for a fiver. (Plus the best part of £20 for the train fare, and a half day's holiday). OK, standing tickets at the Proms are subsidised by the more expensive seats, but I suppose it's just a reflection of supply and demand.

In the entertainment industry they are touts; in commodities they are futures traders ...

[rysmiel]

What on earth is wrong with tickets costing what the market will bear?

Same thing as is wrong with anything else costing what the market will bear: because it encourages zero-sum thinking and prioritising short-term gain over long-term stability.

[addedentry]

That's a valid point, but I'm not persuaded that ticketing or entertainment are particularly unstable.

[monkeyhands]

The Guardian article is conflating a lot of different things: ticket fraud, secondary ticket brokers, ticket-swapping forums, ticket pricing, the free market, organisers' legal responsibilities, organisers' moral responsibilities, etc. It's an article written for people who are completely new to all these concepts.

The problem I have with "the free market" of ticket-selling is the same problem I have with every other "free market": it's not remotely free. It's a market heavily weighted in favour of people who systematically work out exactly when tickets for big events go on sale and then spend a frenzied half-hour or so buying up as many as they can for resale later. (Yes, I know people who do this and I have seen them in action.)

[addedentry]

What prompted me to post the excerpt was the foolish notion of the Real Fan. A Real Fan can buy more tickets than they need in the expectation of selling them informally (as I may end up doing with Truck); a Real Fan can be primed for the start of ticket sales with phone and Internet and several friends' credit card numbers (as j4 has done for Glastonbury).

I'm not saying those practices are bad when individuals do them, nor that they're good when touts/entrepreneurs/secondary ticketing agencies do them. And it would be a fallacy to claim that their moral appropriateness was independent of scale. (Cf. buying literal truckloads of booze in Calais and claiming it's for a party.) But the blurriness of the transition makes me reluctant to be outraged.