Elton John tickets went up for sale in Tassie last week and were sold out in just 8 minutes. Not long afterwards, scalpers were reselling the tickets at highly inflated prices via Ticketmaster’s own reselling website. Obviously Ticketmaster isn’t going to try and restrict the practice of scalping because it means they can double dip on their share of each ticket. They get their initial commission for selling the original ticket, and then they get the extra fees that they charge when someone purchases the scalped ticket through them. I presume it’s based on a percentage of the resale price, so they’re not going to be discouraging anyone from asking for more than what the ticket was originally worth as higher scalper prices mean higher dollar amount when the percentage cut is taken from it all as a reselling fee.
Apparently the Australian government is looking into creating laws to help prevent scalping, but it only goes as far as making it illegal for scalpers to use bots (computer programs) to purchase the tickets in bulk, where the main problem in this case is with Ticketmaster encouraging the resale of tickets at inflated prices by giving the scalpers a platform they can use to legally do this. What the government needs to do is to make it illegal for the tickets to be sold for a profit and to cap resales at the face values they were originally purchased for. This would give anyone who’s purchased a ticket and finds they can no longer attend the show a way to resell their ticket, but will also stop scalpers from actually being able to make a profit from reselling the tickets that they had no intention of using to see the show themselves.
I know a few people who signed up with Ticketmaster to be offered the chance to purchase tickets a few days early, but this didn’t help, as the scalpers were also signed up for this service and most likely used their bots to get in first and grab as many tickets for themselves as possible. So after all of eight minutes, all tickets were sold and the scalpers were already reposting them for sale via the Ticketmaster resale site. The only people to make a profit from the resales are the scalpers and Ticketmaster as the reselling agent. The performer gets no additional money out of it at all. We need consumer laws in place that regulate this to stop the rip off.
As a result of the lack of regulations on scalping my adult step-son, who is on the Autism spectrum, can’t go to the show as tickets could not be purchased from the original sales outlet by his aunt who was online and trying to find a place in the queue when the tickets were initially put up for sale, and we refuse to pay the inflated price to help encourage the scalper who’s trying to sell us one of their overpriced tickets for a massive profit. They will however most likely sell their tickets as there will be people who are wiling to pay the inflated price in order to see the show.
As for the Government trying to stop scalpers from using bots, this doesn’t restrict them from selling tickets at highly inflated prices if they purchase them without the use of bots. It’s like when the GST came in and there was a big political argument about hot and cold chickens because the legislation stated that cold chickens were exempt from the GST. If only the government had enough sense to write cooked or raw chickens instead of hot and cold chickens, it would have saved a lot of wasted time in parliament whilst they bickered with each other about whether the shop owners needed to pop a thermometer into a cooked chicken before deciding if it was GST exempt or not. In this case though, they’re attempting to write legislation that will restrict the way scalpers make their purchases, but doesn’t restrict them from reselling the tickets at an inflated price. Is it really that hard for acting governments to know how to word their legislation proposals so that the laws actually do what the legislation was created for in the first place?
