IT goes without saying that the easing of Covid restrictions, in particular the overdue lifting of capacity limits and curfews on opening times, came as sweet music to the ears of Scotland’s embattled live music industry.
After 18 months of being ravaged by a crippling symphony of lockdown measures and a barrage of discordant Covid curbs, the most ludicrous being last year’s ban on background music, it is now close to breaking point, in critical danger and barely registering a pulse.
No such worries though for those rapacious rogues who, like an unstoppable disease, continue to feed and infect this fragile sector…ticket touts.
Untouchable, invisible, and fearless blood suckers who are able to mutate at will when threatened, allowed to invest in highly profitable variants of ticket scalping to boost their ill-gotten gains, which globally run into the billions and who so far have been resistant, almost immune, to all attempts by the industry and our lamentable governments to eradicate them.
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With only Glasgow’s TRNSMT and Edinburgh’s Fly Open Air now left flying the flag for Scotland’s contemporary music festival scene this year, it has been yet another agonising and bruising summer of silence for this vital industry. One which in 2018 employed nearly 20,000 talented people, many of whom have now sadly, through lack of emergency government support and financial necessity, decided to move on, never to return.
This major sector contributed nearly £500 million to the Scottish economy in music tourism alone. But which, in 2020 as part of the UK’s once vibrant live music industry, has according to a recent report by auditors PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) seen its revenue plummet by a staggering 74.5%, from a healthy £1.6bn to a business-bursting £400 million, a hammer blow from which it is estimated it will take the sector at least three years to fully recover.
We are at a pivotal moment in time, when the industry is attempting to gear up and take its first baby steps towards recovery, in what is still a very uncertain and volatile landscape dominated by talk of possible future lockdowns and the introduction of mandatory Covid passports.
Then up pops another incredibly lucrative scheme engineered by the touts: spec selling.
Spec selling is where traders, who use bogus names and untraceable or false addresses, “speculatively" sell thousands of tickets, at inflated prices online.
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These are tickets which they don’t actually own or have in their possession. It's a fraudulent and very profitable no-risk practice for the mysterious seller, outlawed by the 2006 Fraud Act. It gives them time to work out how to meet the order but if it fails could leave the customer out of pocket and without a ticket.
It's an illegal practice that in 2020 saw two “supertouts” Peter Hunter and David Smith jailed for four years.
Campaigner Adam Welsh of the Fanfare Alliance pressure group has demanded that the Competition and Markets Authority step up to the mark and conduct a full and thorough criminal investigation into these practices.
The CMA seem reluctant to challenge the touts in the courts, preferring to issue well-meaning mealy-mouthed recommendations that if adopted, and it’s a big IF, would clean up the secondary ticketing market. Instead, they have left it up to the UK government to act decisively and strengthen current laws. Let's hope they follow the example of France, Italy and Ireland who have already taken action.
Well, I wouldn’t hold my breath on that happening anytime soon. Until it does, I hope all gigs will be just the ticket and not tickety-boo!
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