From Green Day to Cliff Richard – Introducing Online Ticket Sales
Unless you’ve time on your hands, being in the right place at the right time to get a concert ticket before it sells out is not easy. For example, the entire Manic Street Preachers tour of the UK in 2007 sold out in under and hour. How does an individual who is at work while the tickets are on sale in reality get to purchase a ticket?
Go to the second-hand market.
It used to be the case that the only way to get a second-hand sports or music gig ticket was via a tout at the event itself . This meant getting ripped off, or even possibly handed fake tickets which would inevitably be recognized as such as you tried to enter the event – meaning you not only miss the game or concert, you’ve wasted a bundle of dosh in the process.
Nonetheless, matters have gotten much better for music and sports fans. The resale ticket niche has cleaned up its act in the last decade or so, thanks to the internet. Now there is so much competition to resell tickets online, the marketplace has actually become self-regulating. Your tickets don’t have insurance? I’ll buy my ticket somewhere else! And so many vendors offer insurance if the music gig / sports event is cancelled. And with strong competition online, secondary tickets have come right down in price to the point that sometimes you’re not spending a lot more than the actual original price of the ticket.
Nowadays you can get tickets for many sorts of sports events and concerts. From soccer to basketball matches to cricket, right through to getting hold of decent seats for your favourite band; secondary tickets offer up a second chance to attend the event you want to see. So what to expect online? Use a search engine like Google and type in your keyphrase like Green Day tickets, and you will find a large range of secondary ticket agents who have the ticket you’re looking for.
Not everyone is happy with the idea of resale tickets though. For example, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails calls secondary ticket agents “parasites”, and he’d like to see an end to the resale of event tickets. However, he’s missing the point of resold tickets : people simply do not have the time to queue up for tickets. They’re more likely working when the tickets are on sale, and physically cannot be in the right place at the right time to get hold of the ticket they want in that precious 60 or so minutes it takes for an entire tour to sell out.
While there is strong competition between secondary ticket agents, we believe this is a much needed service for true fans who were unable to buy the tickets the first time around.
