Examination of Witnesses (Questions 40-50)
MR HARVEY
GOLDSMITH CBE, MR
ROB BALLANTINE,
MR GEOFF
ELLIS AND
MR GEOFF
HUCKSTEP
26 JUNE 2007
Q40 Helen Southworth: Can I just
clarify that at the moment the majority of sales on eBay are private
sales. Are you requesting that those be outlawed totally, or is
it touts?
Mr Goldsmith: We want to outlaw
the whole secondary market. A ticket is currency. I am not aware
there is a secondary market in pound notes that you as MPs endorse.
We consider our ticket to be currency, and it is important. We
want eBay to take the "ticket" off their inventory because
they do not need it. We want to have some help in order for us
to help give the genuine word to public that support us, and we
in turn support them by giving them the talent and the artists
they want to see by having a concise, understandable marketplace
that is genuine.
Q41 Adam Price: You mentioned some
promoters being tempted down the route of auctioning as a response
to what has happened. Has that already begun to happen?
Mr Ballantine: Yes, it is absolutely
rife in America. The American live music industry is very interesting,
where scalping took on a whole new head of steam there with the
introduction of Seatwave, viagogo, eBay et cetera et cetera.
Booking fees went through the roof, so you would pay 25% booking
fees on average there instead of the 10-15% you pay over here.
The amount of money over and above the face value of a ticket
you pay there is absolutely enormous. Agents and managers in America
are seeing that the secondary market is taking money out of the
industry and, therefore, they are thinking, "We could do
this ourselves. We'll auction best seats. We'll auction front
row tickets. We'll wrap round a package where you get VIP hospitality
beforehand", and their price is going up and up and the live
market attendances are going down and down and down because people
simply do not have the money to sustain that. If you are the manager
of a band and you think that band has a 15-year shelf life and
if you think "I'll just make as much as I can for that and
then I'm out", then you are going to grab as much as you
can. I think I speak for all of us when I say we are here long-term
and we are looking for a long-term to protect what is one of the
world's greatest industries based here in the UK.
Q42 Adam Price: As a quid pro quo
if the secondary market was prohibited and was taken out of the
equation, would you accept then a ban on promoters auctioning?
Mr Ballantine: It is very difficult
because we are not a regulatory body. I know we here represented
would sign up to that, but what we cannot do necessarily is control
a young entrepreneur, or even an older entrepreneur, who comes
through and is under pressure particularly from the band who want
to make that extra money; because the band with the promoter sets
the ticket price. They might penalise all their fans and say,
"Okay, we'll go for the £150 ticket and let's just play
the arenas and capitalise on those with the deepest pockets".
That is not a sustainable model but for their own particular one
artist maybe they will make the most money by doing it that way.
Mr Ellis: We would be happy to
comply if that part of the legislation was extended.
Mr Ballantine: We individuals
here have never run any auctions or anything. What I am saying
here though is we are not a regulatory body like, say, the FA.
Q43 Adam Price: How do you respond
to be NME poll, which showed that 84% of their readers said that
tickets were just like any other property that you should be able
to sell?
Mr Ballantine: That is a select
part of the NME poll that has come out. It also reveals "Which
of the following, if any, do you think should be made illegal:
ticket touting, online auction?" 59% agreed to that. "Do
you think selling tickets by auction is acceptable?" No,
67%. I am not doing the NME down but it was a quick straw poll
and the secondary market have hung on to this one question like
it is the greatest poll that was ever written. That one answer
is not reflective of what the fans say in this poll.
Q44 Chairman: I have a cutting from
the NME which says "70% of NME readers voted for a complete
ban on ticket touting." It depends which question you ask,
as with most polls.
Mr Ellis: Can I add that the Sun
did a poll as well and 76% of Sun readers want legislation and
only 7% do not agree with legislation. That was in the Sun a few
weeks ago.
Chairman: We all have experience of misleading
polls.
Q45 Rosemary McKenna: Briefly—and
I do know who the Fratellis are—particularly to you, Geoff.
T in the Park has been incredibly successful and has grown and
grown over the years, but there is a real concern now about young
people being ripped off, people buying tickets simply to sell
them on eBay. There was a case of a young man who bought a ticket
from a fraudulent site. What are you doing to try to address that?
Mr Ellis: We are working with
Ticketmaster, who have a system called Access Manager which means
all tickets are bar-coded, which means if we find tickets are
being sold on the secondary market, we can cancel them, providing
the ticket numbers are placed on the website. Unfortunately, a
lot of people cover up the numbers. We have examples of people
putting tape over the tickets when they put them up. We are able
to cancel tickets with our Access Manager system. That helps us.
We do limit them to two per person this year. I have had letters
of complaint from families saying, "We can't go now"
but if we make it four per person, we play into the hands of touts,
so it is difficult. We do what we can. We feel we price the event
fairly but we are up against it without legislation. Philip says
it is a different issue to the one of fraudulent sales, but it
actually is not, because the fraudsters hide behind the ticket
touts. We have had lots of examples of scores of people outside
T in the Park who have travelled long distances, their tickets
never arrived, they were never delivered, so they could not get
into the event, which gives us a welfare issue as well, because
we have people who have travelled long distances, were planning
to stay there for the weekend and we have to try and get them
home. We are having to bus people back, put them in taxis and
so on at our expense. You could say that was not ticket touting,
it was fraud but that fraud takes place on eBay as well. I had
an e-mail from somebody yesterday who spent £1,200 on six
tickets from eBay and their tickets have never shown up. The fraudulent
activity is going on because of a lack of legislation.
Q46 Rosemary McKenna: If there were
legislation, it would stop that as well?
Mr Ellis: It would.
Q47 Rosemary McKenna: I just wonder
how we would do it. For example, currently on eBay you have this
great thing, the high-street stores, the Kate Moss dress, people
go in and buy half a dozen and within minutes they are on eBay,
and that kind of thing. How would a law change that?
Mr Ellis: I am sure eBay will
answer this themselves but if ticket touting were illegal, eBay
would not allow tickets to be sold. That in itself stops it.
Mr Ballantine: This is the Department
of Culture, Media and Sport. Whilst we are talking about Fratellis
and T in the Park and Arctic Monkeys, we at SJM Concerts have
been appointed to do the entertainment for the European Capital
of Culture in Liverpool in 2008. That is something that DCMS bodies
must be hugely proud of, that that is coming to the UK, and very
excited about what is going to happen there. We are aiming exceedingly
high, as is everybody in Liverpool, and what is being lined up
will be absolutely spectacular and a complete one-off, with some
true Liverpool legends doing some very interesting stuff. Our
biggest problem is what to charge for tickets. People will pay
£500 for this. We can only look after 25,000 people. To maximise
the income and pay for all these events, we could do 25,000 tickets
at £500 but I am sure you and all your colleagues would be
up in arms as soon as you read about that in the papers. So what
do we do? Do we say we will make it affordable, call it, say,
£50? We know that pretty much everybody can afford £50
given six or seven months to work towards that ticket. Great.
We also know that as soon as we sell those 25,000 tickets at £50,
10,000 of them will be straight on to eBay the following day.
You might say, "We will protect that under the Crown Jewels
example" but we would come back and say "Hang on, but
how is that different from T in the Park? These are the same members
of the public." It is very difficult for us to sit here and
say you all understand culture, special events, one-offs. Somewhere
we touch a nerve on every single one of you about the Live Experience
and what it means to see people celebrating the greatness of this
country's Music Industry. Whether it be Liverpool 2008, T in the
Park or the Arctic Monkeys, somewhere along the line someone is
going to say, "Actually, it is not about just grabbing that
ticket and selling it, making all that profit, declaring none
of it and marching off into the sunset."
Mr Goldsmith: It is the same for
the Olympics because for 2012 in London for the first time ever
the areas of culture and the cultural side of the Olympics are
pretty important to all Olympic Games today and the Director of
Ceremonies, the opening, closing and all the other ceremonies
are now under one group. So here you have this group where you
are quite happy, you will pass the legislation, which you have
done, to prevent ticket touting or secondary market of tickets
to see the games and the opening and closing ceremonies, yet the
very same people are encouraging and putting on a whole raft of
cultural events where the public can be absolutely ripped off,
taken to the cleaners, no guarantee, no safety of their tickets,
in the same thing. How does that work? Where is the equality in
that? It does not make any sense.
Q48 Paul Farrelly: The Department
of Culture, Media and Sport has had a number of ticket touting
summits. I think the Association of Secondary Ticket Agents has
been chucked out of at least one of them because of a failure
to see eye to eye over fundamental practices. One of the things
that has come out of that is this middle way of the Crown Jewels,
the Crown Jewels of sport. If we had a Crown Jewels of music,
we would have a lot of fun because the Stones would be up there,
Springsteen certainly would. Would Rod Stewart be a Crown Jewel?
Mr Goldsmith: You cannot have
a Crown Jewels of music.
Q49 Paul Farrelly: Do you think the
white smoke emanating from the Department in terms of the Crown
Jewels is too sport-biased?
Mr Ellis: It is. You can make
T in the Park and Glastonbury and annual events Crown Jewels fairly
easily. That would be easy to do and would protect those events.
But the next article or event. The arrangements could be maybe
a month before it goes on sale and there is not enough time to
allocate it as a Crown Jewel event. The public maybe feel that
the Killers should be a Crown Jewels event but it is not. You
might think Rod Stewart should be but there is not the demand
to see it. It would be impractical to do and it would just be
rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic.
Q50 Paul Farrelly: We have a very
fair returns policy in the ticket exchange here in the Commons.
Tomorrow is Tony Blair's last performance and the tickets would
sell like hot cakes but, of course, we are not allowed to sell
them. I do not have an allocation. I have to queue up for returns.
I suspect some of my free-market colleagues on the Committee,
if I had some and decided to auction them, they would have the
Speaker lynch me. Do you think what is right and proper for the
Commons should be extended outside to the ordinary music-buying
public?
Mr Goldsmith: We have returns,
we absolutely have returns, and quite often, when we have artists
that are in huge demand, we will hold some tickets back for the
night or for the week of in order to try and destroy this ongoing
market. If a show is sold out very quickly, as is Wimbledon and
so on and so forth, of course there is a returns policy but what
Rob was trying to explain to you and what we feel very strongly
about is that what we do not want is to be a carrier bag for every
ticket tout and every secondary market player without the help
of some directorate of legislation that we can genuinely tell
the public at large where to go so that they know that their ticket
is safe. Please remember, when you buy from the secondary market,
one, none of them will give you a guarantee and two, in many instances
a number of them are not even there if something goes wrong. If
a concert is cancelled, either due to inclement weather, which
is rare because we live with it, if an artist is ill, if you go
back to what we consider to be the official agencies, particularly
through STAR and ourselves, you will get a refund. If you go back
to the secondary market, there is absolutely no chance of getting
a refund, if you can find them. That just does not happen.
Chairman: We are going to have to stop
it there. Thank you very much.
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