Touts are costing UK music fans an extra £145m a year, according to research from the telecoms company O2, which said it was fending off thousands of attacks each week from automated “bots” used to harvest tickets at consumers’ expense.
O2, which sells more than 1m live music tickets a year, called for legislation after a survey for the company by YouGov illustrated how professional touts were “abusing the market and stealing tickets out of fans’ hands”.
Meanwhile, a government consultation is expected to focus on whether to ban for-profit ticket resale. On Tuesday, the culture secretary, Lisa Nandy, told the Labour party conference: “We’re taking action on rip-off ticket touts because culture belongs to everybody.”
The consultation will also examine the controversial “dynamic pricing” tactic that sent prices for the Oasis reunion tour soaring last month.
Almost half of gig-going fans surveyed by YouGov said they found it hard to know whether they were buying from an authorised sales outlet or a “secondary” site such as Viagogo or StubHub.
One in five tickets sold in the UK ends up on such a website, where touts can exploit huge demand to charge mark-ups worth thousands of pounds, the report found.
This results in “industrial-scale” ticket touting in which professional traders pocket about £145m a year before expenses, according to analysis by O2.
The estimate, approved by YouGov, is based on cross-referencing the survey data with figures from from the industry body UK Music’s data on the live music market. The size of the ticket touting market is notoriously hard to estimate, in part because of limits on access to data held by the big resale platforms.
O2, which has naming rights on music venues across the country including the former Millennium Dome in east London, sells about 1.4m tickets a year through its Priority platform, which gives customers advance access.
But O2 said it fought a constant battle against automated “bot” software attempting to hijack the platform to grab tickets for resale. The compnay prevented more than 50,000 suspected bots from entering the platform over one six-week period.
O2 said it supported calls from the anti-touting campaign group FanFair Alliance for tougher legislation against the resale of tickets for profit, although the company stopped short of backing an outright ban on the practice.
It wants customers to be given more information during the purchase process on resale sites including a popup notification that explains who the ticket is being bought from and the potential risks involved.
Resale platforms are required to publish the details of professional ticket traders who sell more than 100 tickets a year but that information is often incomplete and hard to access. Guardian analysis has previously revealed the identities of touts advertising hundreds of tickets at a time.
Gareth Griffiths, the director of partnerships and sponsorship at O2, said: “We are tired of professional ticket touts abusing the ticket marketplace and stealing tickets out of fans’ hands, only to immediately relist them at inflated prices.
“Music fans deserve the chance to buy tickets at a price set by their favourite artist, but all too often they are forced to pay a price decided by a stranger on the internet.”
O2 also wants search engineers to clearly identify resale platforms so that they can’t “buy their way to the top of search results” without disclosing that their tickets are resales.
Sharon Hodgson, the MP for Washington and Gateshead South and chair of a cross-party parliamentary group examining ticketing, said: “I have fought tirelessly alongside FanFair Alliance to end ticketing abuse and ensure that my constituents, and people across our country, have fair access to the events that bring us together, without falling victim to exploitative touts.
“These new insights serve to further demonstrate the desire amongst music fans for change and we look forward to collaborating with O2 and the music industry to bring that change about. We will not stop until we are fully confident in the fairness of the UK’s ticketing industry.”
In March, while still in opposition, Keir Starmer indicated that Labour would cap the price at which music and sports tickets could be resold, a measure designed to crimp resale platforms’ income or even put them out of business.
The proposal is to be considered as part of a wider consultation on ticketing that will begin later this year.
