Tim Almond

Bands want slice of profit from resold gig tickets

Radiohead, Robbie Williams and Arctic Monkeys joined calls yesterday for a levy to be added to tickets resold on the web to allow musicians to claw back some of the profits made by touts and fans.

What a bunch of ingrates. Not enough to have millions in the bank, adulation of thousands, sex on a plate and a gopher to pick out the green M&Ms, they now want a piece of the few quid that their fans might make selling on a ticket that they queued for and paid for.

They proposed the creation of a Resale Rights Society, which would collect a fee from each ticket sold on eBay and other websites such as Seatwave, Viagogo and GetMeIn.com that have sprung up to satisfy the demand to trade concert tickets.

What’s it to you? You sold it, it’s not yours.

They said the levy would help to ensure that money raised from the boom in live music flowed back into the industry rather than the pockets of venture capitalists.

Alternatively, you could just get your ticket prices right and then venture capitalists wouldn’t make money and it would all go back into the industry.

Marc Marot, chairman-elect of the RRS and the former chief executive of Island Records, said the levy proposal was a “grown-up solution” to a “completely unregulated area”.

It’s no less regulated than selling CDs or downloads. Maybe we should bring in some regulations on Island Records, like maybe a cooling off period for crappy U2 albums.

“The secondary ticketing market offers benefits to music fans and the live music industry alike. It does not make sense to try and criminalise it,” he said. “On the other hand there are real issues of consumer protection here. It is unacceptable that not a penny of the £200m in transactions generated by the resale of concert tickets in the UK is returned to investors in the live music industry.”

It’s perfectly acceptable. When Island buy the rights from someone and it turns out to be a surprise hit, do they reward them above the contract? Of course they don’t.

Marot said the move was not intended to boost the bank balances of big names such as Mick Jagger and Sting but to help new artists who increasingly make less money from recorded music sales and rely on income from gigs to make a living.

Bullshit. This is nothing about new bands. New bands don’t sell out in 35 minutes. Despite being only 4 days away, I can still buy tickets to go and see new bands Cansei der Ser Sexy at the Oxford Zodiac next week, or Hard-Fi next week or Athlete in January. Therefore, the ticket prices on eBay for those bands are face value or less, so there’s no profit for them from a secondary market anyway.

Tags: Politics, Music //