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Ticketmaster’s resale chief enters secondary ticketing debate

By Chris Cooke | Published on Wednesday 5 February 2014

While Ticketmaster’s TicketsNow resale service has often been at the heart of the secondary ticketing debate in the US over the years, in the UK the Live Nation subsidiary’s equivalent Get Me In! platform has generally avoided too much bad press, with the ‘ticket touting is evil’ brigade generally focusing on rivals Viagogo and Seatwave, and sometimes eBay’s StubHub business.

But the ticketing giant has voluntarily entered the debate as a new All-Party Parliamentary Group, led by MPs Mike Weatherly and Sharon Hodgson, prepares to debate ticketing industry issues in Westminster, with secondary ticketing high up on the agenda, presumably alongside other gripes like ticket commissions in the primary market and outright ticket fraud.

Noting that the new APPG’s name – it’s a group focused on ‘ticket abuse’ – possibly implies some preconceived views on the secondary ticketing issue, Ticketmaster International’s MD of Resale, Christoph Homann, told CMU: “I welcome any efforts to improve understanding of our fast-changing and technology-driven sector. That is why I have always made clear my enthusiasm to appear before the All-Party Parliamentary Group, so that they can hear both sides of the argument on resale”.

He goes on: “Cynics might say that a lot about the group – from its title, to its terms of reference, to the witnesses it is calling – reflects a closed mind as to the reality of fan demand for ticket resale. I don’t believe that is the case, and that is why I am pressing hard behind the scenes for the Group to hear our evidence from the coalface. It is extremely important that the Group hears from responsible resale platforms such as ourselves in order to receive a balanced picture of the industry and the issues at stake”.

For Ticketmaster, the ‘abuse’ bit of secondary ticketing isn’t the very notion of touting itself, but those touts who employ software to buy up high quantities of tickets to in-demand events from primary platforms in order to sell on at a massive mark-up via the secondary sites (let’s ignore the artist and promoters who grab a pile of tickets to their own shows and secretly sell them on the resale sites themselves).

Focusing in on the ‘bots’ employed by those industrial-scale touts, Homann continued: “Getting tough on bots is one of the real-world measures we have put on the table, even before the APPG commenced. As the market leader and a UK-registered enterprise that has an ongoing investment in technology and people, we have made it clear that we are firmly part of the solution to any perceived issues in the sector. No one – least of all fans and voters – will gain if artificial restrictions on the right to resell tickets are imposed on a public that benefits from a free and dynamic market in ticketing”.

Away from the resale debate, as previously reported, Ticketmaster is one of a number of UK firms committed to making add-on commissions clearer at the outset of purchases on its primary ticketing platforms, ticketmaster.co.uk itself and TicketWeb. That move is partly in response to a recent Which? report that criticised ticket commissions, though Ticketmaster’s Simon Presswell told Music Week that the changes were already underway on the back of talks with the Advertising Standards Authority that began nearly a year ago.