Concert promoters and artist managers in the United Kingdom are calling on the country’s culture secretary to back a proposal that would cap resold ticket profits at 10 percent above face value.
The plan was initially proposed in Parliament earlier this year by member Sharon Hodgson, but it has since languished.
On Monday, November 28, a group of promoters and mangers tried to revive interest in the bill by meeting with Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt. Included in the group were Muse manger Anthony Addis and Iron Maiden manager Ron Smallwood.
“We don’t expect our tickets to be bought at this fair price and then resold immediately for five times that price and more,” Smallwood told The Times newspaper. “When tickets go on sale, half mysteriously appear on the so-called secondary sites. And who gains from that? Not the artist or the event, not the taxman, and certainly not the fans.”
In early 2010, the country’s ticket resale industry avoided regulation after a government study determined that the secondary ticket market could police itself.
That report didn’t stop Hodgson from proposing the bill a year later. The bill calls on the resale industry, promoters and others to work on creating a “fairer system,” wherein fans can exchange tickets with little or no mark-ups.
In recent months, at least five separate online petitions that support a cap on ticket resale have sprung up on the government’s Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) Web site. The petitions are posted by the citizens, but so far only one has more than 100 signatures.
Following Monday’s meeting, the DCMS office released a statement that said it did not anticipate supporting a move toward regulation.
“This Government, in any case, believes the lightest practical regulatory burden is the right approach,” the DCMS wrote. “Unless there is a demonstrable market failure there is not a case for Government action.”
Edward Parkinson, director of UK-based ticket resale company viagogo, told TicketNews in a statement that price caps are not the answer.
“This is because you can’t regulate the touts who would still charge whatever they want,” Parkinson said. “All this would do would be to increase the number of tickets being sold back in the pubs, clubs and car parks of the black market, which would undermine all the work we’ve been doing to bring security to the market.”
Parkinson said that nearly half of the tickets resold on viagogo are for face value or less, and the average premium for the remaining tickets is only about 15-20 percent above face value, not the exorbitant amounts Smallwood describes.
“There are very few chancers on our Web site listing their tickets at extortionate prices,” Parkinson added. “We’ve been through lengthy debates about regulating ticket resellers before, and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport carried out a select committee hearing and a public consultation, which concluded that secure Web sites like ours are in the public interest.”
