As the debate on scalping rages on, ITM gets the promoter’s perspective from one of Australia’s biggest; John Wall at Fuzzy.
One of the biggest issues in clubland these days is scalping. Or is it? Depends who you ask, certainly every time a big event sells out fast, tickets immediately appear on eBay at up to 3 or 4 times their face value. Events like Big Day Out, Field Day and Splendour In The Grass have been selling out faster than ever before, leaving many prospective customers without tickets. Some get angry and many blame scalpers for “buying up all the tickets”, thereby depriving genuine buyers of tickets at the original price. Others just think it’s wrong for someone to resell something at a higher price – basically being a ‘parasite’. Some think it’s a free market and just as someone can buy a painting and sell it later for more than the artist got, the same should go for anything else. If someone is willing to pay then who cares?
As a promoter, the advent of eBay has meant that scalpers – previously a ubiquitous but relatively insignificant presence around the entrance to events – have become much more visible, and therefore have angered customers, who in turn demand that something be done to stop scalping. We, of course, have looked closely at the issue and follow how many tickets change hands on eBay. For Fuzzy events in the past they haven’t made up a big proportion of the total capacity, the most being around 500 tickets for a 25,000 person capacity event. Even if there are 4 times as many tickets changing hands as we’re able to keep track of, this is still less than 10% of the capacity.
Today on eBay there are 147 people selling Field Day tickets. Most say they have one or two, but if even if the average was 10 each, that’s still only 5.9% of the entire capacity – about the same size as the free guestlist. Scalping isn’t what makes these events sell out fast – it’s the increase in demand from real customers – it’s why there are more and bigger events on – and, unlike 5 years ago, most people now have a fast internet connection and are happy to buy things online. Even when Splendour In The Grass introduced a rule that tickets had to have the purchaser’s name and date of birth so it couldn’t be transferred, the festival still sold out in a flash.
The thing is, of course, no matter how many times we tell people “scalpers didn’t buy all, or most, or even a big percentage of the tickets”, no-one will believe it. They don’t care about the statistics, it’s the principle of the matter. What really makes people upset about scalping is that others are profiting from the misery (or at least, the disappointment) of others. Scalping makes us angry as event organisers because it introduces a lot of negative feelings around our events, even though we put in a huge effort to try to make them a positive experience from start to finish.
We’re about to introduce a new system which should make it very hard to resell tickets. The trick is to make it hard for scalpers but easy for real customers. When you buy the tickets you’ll put in your name and date of birth, then we’ll send you an email with a barcode. You print it out and bring it to the party, along with your photo ID. You’ll be able to bring in a few friends with you, or you can put in the name and DOB of each person so they can come in separately. It’ll also be possible to make changes online (up to a point), so you’re not stuck with a ticket if you can’t come. There’ll also be a limit, so serial ticket transferrers will be barred from making changes.
This will make it easy for you, but hard for scalpers, as they’ll be trying to sell a printout with “THIS TICKET CAN BE CANCELLED AT ANY TIME BY THE ORIGINAL PURCHASER” in big letters across the top! If they keep buying tickets then changing the name, they’ll be banned from the system. We could go further and insist on everyone’s name and date of birth and never allow changes, but then we’d be making life harder for the 95% of people who are just buying tickets for themselves.
Hopefully that’ll make everyone happier… well, except would-be scalpers.
![Moby - After [ITM Premiere]](http://ic.i.tsatic-cdn.net/1454/65_50/c88d2_1454545.jpg "Moby - After [ITM Premiere]")
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