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Mumford & Sons negotiate extension on public consultation for government’s secondary ticketing review

By | Published on Thursday 17 December 2015

Mumford & Sons

Mumford & Sons have negotiated an extension on the previously reported public consultation that was conducted as part the government’s latest review of the secondary ticketing market. Those with an opinion now have until this Friday to submit their views.

In a statement yesterday, Mumford & Sons laid out their own thoughts on the matter, urging fans to support them in calling for stronger regulation of ticketing resale sites. Although the public consultation officially closed on 20 Nov, the band said that they had personally gone into the Department of Culture, Media & Sport last week and convinced Michael Waterson, who is overseeing the review, to extend it to 18 Dec.

“By our estimation when [our latest] tour went on general sale there were roughly 6000 tickets out there on secondary ticket platforms across the UK tour, including 1500 for each night at The O2 in London”, said the band. “People may argue that those tickets have already been sold and we’re getting the money anyway. But that’s not how we see it. We want fans of the band to be able to get into our shows for the right price, to feel that they’ve got value for money. We want every seat in a sold out show to be filled with a fan. Why do we care so much? Because it’s not right, it hurts our fans and it’s a problem for all artists”.

They went on: “Behind the scenes over the years, we have tried a lot of different ways to beat the touts including trying to get as many of the tickets as possible for a show to sell ourselves through ticket companies that we choose; we hold back tickets to put back on sale at face value nearer to the show so that fans have a second bite of the cherry at buying tickets at the right price, we’ve cancelled thousands of orders by arduously going through ticket purchases order-by-order to weed out known touts and dodgy credit cards; we’ve even gone as far as to put all of the tickets in one US tour we did into a lottery system so that we were able to remove all of the touts before only inviting legitimate fans to buy the tickets. We need your help to win this battle. We urge you again to use face-value only secondary ticketing sites either to sell or buy tickets”.

“We personally went in to the UK’s Department of Culture, Media & Sport last Thursday morning and met with Professor Waterson who’s conducting an independent parliamentary review into this issue of secondary ticketing”, they finished. “We voiced our concerns, and we’ve been welcomed to give them more evidence of these bad practices, which we will do. In the meantime if any of you has a bad story to tell about buying tickets via secondary ticketing sites, the review would welcome your feedback”.

They encouraged fans to email their views to [email protected], noting that “you will get a message back saying that the deadline for submitting evidence has passed, but we’ve managed to get an extension until 18 Dec”.

This new review of the secondary ticketing market by the Department Of Culture, Media & Sport was announced in October. While some regulation of online ticket touting was added to the Consumer Rights Act at the end of the last parliament, it was watered down from what many wanted. However, in passing the legislation the government said that there should be another review of the market too. Which is why this is all happening now. Well, the review. The CRA didn’t say anything about last minute interventions by Mumford & Sons.



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