Concert ticket prices: Is it time for better consumer protection?

High prices, driven up by resellers have made it hard for real fans to secure ticket to see their favourite artists.

Transcript

00:00Well, indeed, the whole thing about ticketing prices is that you go on expecting to pay

00:05maybe £70 or £80 and you get to the website and, of course, they're not available.

00:09So you're into the £150 and they may be the cheapest tickets you can get hold of.

00:14I had an instance fairly recently.

00:16And then if you don't get them and you have to move pretty quickly for some artists, you're

00:20into the £400, £500, £600 for the VIP package, whatever that may mean.

00:25There is a whole aspect to this that the music industry has changed.

00:29And, of course, artists see this as a major way, if you like, of recouping their investment

00:34in terms of their artistic talents and so on and so forth.

00:38Quite clearly, of course, it's a free market.

00:40We don't have to pay those prices.

00:44There's a difficulty, but undoubtedly a lot of people are really concerned.

00:48UK concert tickets are skyrocketing thanks to a combination of soaring production costs,

00:54hefty fees from middlemen and the relentless grip of scalpers and bots.

01:00Bands need to cover expenses for venues, security and logistics.

01:03Meanwhile, resellers snap up tickets in bulk, flipping them at crazy markups and adding service fees.

01:11Fans end up paying a premium.

01:14Well, yeah, possibly so.

01:16I mean, again, the best example is that sort of some of the budget airlines were sort of, you know,

01:20it's shady practice.

01:21They sort of sell the fare as the sort of the minimum package.

01:24And then they add all the bits on, which, of course, you know, it becomes a lot more.

01:27So these are sort of the hidden costs.

01:29But, you know, the ticketing, it's more straightforward.

01:32You go and see an artist and you pay whatever the sort of the ticket prices are.

01:36But, you know, certainly, you know, when I was growing up, yeah, it was a standard price for the whole venue.

01:41Many of the tickets that sort of end up in the hands of buyers are not sort of genuine buyers.

01:45They're sort of, you know, people sort of operating from sort of, you know, clever IT and, of course, you know, bots and so on and so forth.

01:51So they sort of scoop up a whole load of tickets and then they resell them.

01:54So I think that's highly immoral.

01:56You know, we need to sort of clamp down on that sort of profiteering.