UK Caps Ticket Resale at Face Value: What Took So Long?

0:00Robert Smith stopped the sales of 7 ,000 tickets for their last tour. Back in 2023, he managed to find out who all the secondary ticketing people were, and secondary ticketing being a nice word for touts, and he stopped the sales of their tickets. He did not refund them, he just took the money away. And that prevented scalpers, as they're sometimes called, touts as they're known in the UK, from profiting from their live shows. It also then meant that more fans had the chance to buy tickets to go see one of their favourite bands. And this happens a lot. We've seen Taylor Swift talk about it. Last week we saw Hayley Williams from Paramore work with a company called Open Stage to basically verify that a fan is a fan.

0:45And no, that did not include name three songs, but it could have done. And I think that secondary ticketing, companies like Viagogo and StubHub have got away with things for far too long.

1:00Ever wondered why you couldn't get a ticket to the biggest gigs? A dispatcher's undercover investigation tells you the real story online ticket companies didn't want you to see. The great ticket scandal contains some strong language. Concerts sold out. Sporting events sold out. Theatres sold out. And even a sold out art gallery. But hang on, if you go online, there are lots of tickets for sale, some at incredible prices. 100, 200, 300, 400, a thousand pounds, one single ticket, more than two grand. I've had to pay it because there was no other way around it really. But yeah, it sucks.

1:50in fact back in 2010 a Labour MP in the UK tried to bring in a law to make secretary ticketing something that was harder and more regulated and was now 2026 and finally the Labour government are making good on a manifesto pledge to stop the resale of tickets well not stop it cap it and by capping it I mean if you're going to resell a ticket you can't make a profit from it. I think you can maybe charge a admin fee and I think that's about it. The new rules are going to come through and it's going to go through the House of Commons and through the House of Lords and then become a law and I spoke in this week's episode to a campaigner.

2:33I'm not going to say this in a way that he's not going to like very much but I found what Fanfare Alliance are doing really inspiring. Adam Webb is someone who has quietly chiselled away and tried to make change happen. I've attended a few events that the Fanfare Alliance have organised. I've listened to Mumford and Sons manager talking about how they were trying to prevent their fans being ripped off. I've listened to artists, managers, all sorts of people for years basically trying to stop people extracting money from the music industry, taking money from genuine music fans at just a pure profit because when someone resells a ticket and they buy up hundreds of them that is preventing fans that join the queue to buy a ticket when the tickets went on sale from getting a ticket and someone who is just really wealthy or someone who's saved up a lot of money to get a ticket to get into the show but that money is not going to the artist it's not even going to the promoter unless there are some dodgy promoters out there doing secondary ticketing sales and i think that this change is massive and it's going to be great for music fans.

3:43So there are a few things in this episode that we talk about that I should probably do a little bit explaining. So secondary ticketing is just when you resell a ticket. So I guess it's the secondary sale. It is a very polite way of saying something which is basically touting your ticket because the vast majority of tickets available on these sites. I think it's something like 95 % of tickets on places like Viagogo and StubHub are not being sold by music fans like me and you who couldn't attend a show and put the tickets up for sale. And there were also platforms where you can go like Twickets and you can just resell your ticket at face value to another fan.

4:24You can also return your ticket on Dice and some venues allow you to take your tickets back and you can turn up and buy a return ticket at the same price that it should have been charged at. No one is profiting, but someone is getting a ticket and getting into a show at the price that it was advertised for. And ticket pricing is a weird thing and we get into that a little bit in this episode. One of the other things we touch on is the CMA, which is the Competition and Markets Authority. They basically regulate all businesses. They have been looking into ticketing for a while and they are part of this and Adam talks a fair a bit about them in this episode.

4:58Bots, robots, they are machines which harvest tickets. They are bits of software written to bypass the queue to find secret URLs that the average person doesn't find. They can fill in forms super fast, faster than the average music fan. So that's what a bot is. I mean, that's massively oversimplifying. I'm sure they're much more complicated than that. And Viagogo, if you've not seen them in the search results when you're looking for tickets, for a show or a festival. They are a secondary ticketing website and they're the ones which I think have taken probably the most flack of all the companies.

5:34So without further ado, let's get into this episode of the Drowning Sound podcast.

5:52so welcome to join and sound podcast adam we've met a bunch of times at different events about making ticketing fairer and there's been progress after i think 2011 was the first time we sat in a room with a politician saying we're going to change this and get rid of secondary ticketing and make it fairer for fans you've been on that journey i think since that point if not before where did your journey start on trying to make ticketing fairer gosh so i can if i rewind it back actually i was at uk music in 2012 i was just about to leave i I was like the head of comms there when they set it up under Virgil Sharkey.

6:35And the week before I left, they were first bringing the live industry into UK music. So historically, it was just kind of the recorded business, but they kind of brought in the live group sort of as a chunk. And Channel 4 had just run a dispatches investigation on Viagogo and secondary ticketing. Yeah, I found it on YouTube the other day. It was a proper groundbreaking doc. It's wild. yeah yeah yeah it's a fascinating it was kind of a trigger to buy go go actually took channel four to the high court to try and get it stop the broadcast um and they it was one of the reasons that they decamped to switzerland afterwards but it's um yeah so it's a fascinating it's a fascinating insight into into kind of how those websites work so they they've got sort of journalist into um buy go go and one into seat wave um and yeah the tickets were either coming directly from promoters they were coming from large-scale ticket touts or all the staff seemed to have about 50 credit cards each that were buying to anyway there were kind of no consumers buying and reselling well reselling tickets it was mainly from those three sources and and i think that caused a real i think it was the first kind of eye-opener about what this market actually is and kind of how it was being sold which was fan to fan and actually the reality was this um fortunately for me i'd kind of left UK music so I wasn't the one having to kind of like argue the case around this but I think for me that's always been a bit of a line anyway in terms of you know before that dispatches documentary I think anyone could have had a within the industry could have had a um uh it could have could actually be to say you know we'd actually understand what this market is but I think after dispatches you know anyone who was doing business with Viagog or StubHub you know at least have a longer look at themselves because it was fairly evident at that point because it seemed like a way that some people in the industry were making a bit of extra money and i think it was like sometimes there was like artists involved with or managers or promoters or agents it was like and i think that to me as a music fan like i've i think around that's there was definitely a moment for me where i went from tickets out to these blokes outside of a venue that have their police putting in some effort by having to stand out there all night in the rain and try and flog their tickets and maybe be a bit aggressive with you i think one of the first gigs i came to london for i remember a ticket towel like pushing a friend of mine into the wall because she tried to ask for five pounds off a ticket that was already like double the asking price and it got really violent with this like 17 18 year old girl um and that to me felt like well there's some labor involved in that like they're getting a cut of the ticket money and it's a profession in a way like but then it became just bots just buying tickets and I guess now with a agentic AI that's probably even more sophisticated the way in which it can pretend to be a person to purchase a ticket and I think I remember with the Kate Bush tickets being like what these are on secondary ticketing and they tried to do everything to stop it when I worked at Six Music Six Music Festival was on at the Barrowlands and they had Depeche Mode like it's one of the greatest gigs I've ever seen and I probably would have been one of the few occasions where I might have spent a silly amount of money on a ticket but luckily I was working maybe not so luckily because I had to be in two head spaces at one point but those tickets I think it was two minutes before they went on sale were available on secondary ticketing which was they weren't even available yet so how did you have tickets up and why were they so expensive because I don't know why I just decided to check just before the tickets went on sale and the BBC obviously did them at a very low price to make the shows accessible it was kind of like a televised event and so many of these things have happened and I've heard different politicians make promises and I know that you've heard way more of these promises than I have but it just feels deeply unfair as a fan to think that you've joined the same queue as everyone else to try and buy a ticket for an artist you like and you can't get a ticket and I guess at least in the past when people were buying those tickets up it was not on the scale it is now it's like it's over 100 million isn't it 145 million the estimated profits that people are making on secondary ticketing it may be even more than that yeah i mean i mean it it it's funny because i think that that one of the difficulties has actually been measuring this market and again as i mean when the fanfare campaign kind of kicked off in 2016 so i got kind of asked to run this by a group of well by the mnf who kind of started it and a group of music managers who kind of funded it initially and it's funny because it's a really emotional conversation i think it was very much around bots um which just get presented these kind of alien things that you know buying the tickets kind of removing the fact that there's a human hand you know behind these things and a kind of a business behind it um and actually one of the things was no one's actually quite sure how big this market was i think for that for the sake of obviously a lot of these companies were trying to flog themselves so they were quite keen to say oh it's worth a billion two billion i think actually when the CMA investigated Viagoga's acquisition of StopUp in 2021, they asked Viagoga and StopUp this question and they said, oh, we think that the UK market's worth between 1.5 and 2.5 billion pounds.

11:59So quite a big difference. But when the CMA actually looked at the receipts, they're like, oh, actually, it's 350 million. So it's actually less than 20 % of what these companies were claiming. I mean, I think gives you kind of an insight into the motivation. Was that just in the UK? Just in the UK. That's crazy. When you think that that's all money being extracted from artists and music fans. Absolutely. And I think that's kind of our message at the moment is that, you know, this kind of racket has been going on for such a long time. It's such a large scale. and it literally is once you understand that the platforms themselves are based offshore and an awful lot of actually of the touts are based offshore as well i mean basically this is money that's coming out of the back pockets of fans here and it's flowing off you know here there and everywhere but it's obviously leaving yeah i saw like to buy australia israel there's all sorts of places when there was an investigation i think it was on radio four and they were like meeting the sneaker kids that had worked out how to create these little bot farms because they were all trying to buy limited edition sneak uh trainers um and then they realized they could use the same technologies buy tickets and so yeah let's let's not tease any further so what has changed um what's what is the government planning to bring in and how do you think robert smith will feel about it i think robert smith will be i think he'll be really happy about it actually um um and again i think one of the things i think that he proved was actually that artists have a lot more power than maybe they think.

13:31I think sometimes, again, he obviously he's, again, he's in a slightly unusual position because he doesn't, you know, he's kind of his own boss. He doesn't have a manager. He doesn't have a, you know, because he works with his agent and lawyer and stuff, but he's obviously he's been quite direct about a lot of this stuff. But I think, so effectively what the government's going to be doing is that there are price caps in other countries like Ireland, Australia, some of the Australian states, some of the countries in Europe. but effectively it's going to kind of mandate the the kind of the capped resale business that's already in the uk so basically all of the all of the primary ticketing companies now whether that's ticketmaster or c or access or eventim whoever they all offer resale for the price you paid so you can resell a ticket you bought through them you're not going to make any money and then somebody else can buy this buy the same ticket i mean it's actually just reassuring the ticket and put it back as if as if you walked back into the venue and handed the ticket back and they sold it on the door to someone else which the south bank says one of the few places where in london you can still do that i think by returns and just buy them on the door back from someone that couldn't make it yeah so so so you've got that you've also obviously you've got your services like uh like twickets and tixall you've got dice i mean actually resident advisor i think was was the thing the first primary service that offered resale but actually there's there's there's actually a shit ton of places where you can resell the ticket.

14:51It's kind of like everyone's doing it. So we've kind of moved to this place where secondary ticketing, which is kind of an artificial term invented by Eric Baker, who set up StarPub and Viagogo because it sounds better than ticket scalping. We're kind of moving away from this exploitative system of a fairly small bunch of touts, hoovering up loads of tickets, taking them out of the primary market, creating demand and then saying, well, we can service your demand over here at market price and then hopefully putting it into that and then trying to help these other servers kind of flourish. So the cap is kind of really critical for that, I think, and obviously the enforcement of it.

15:30There's some extra, I mean, there's some extra parts to this as well. So you won't be allowed to resell more tickets than you can buy in primary. It's putting liabilities on the secondary ticketing sites as well. I think like a lot of platform businesses, you know, particularly Viagogo will be like, well, if you tell us what's against, you know, how people are breaking the law on our website, we might take some action. But, you know, we can't we can't we can't check in here, this kind of stuff. And I think that that's that's what I was going to say. Just so one of the things that stands out to me is why wouldn't Viagogo stop someone who's put a ticket on sale within like minutes or hours of a show going on sale?

16:05Surely that person hasn't bought that ticket and then realized they can't attend. I think A, they don't care. and B, they've got no incentive to do it. And I think one of the things that's really, and again, I've done so much research into a lot of investigations around what's on these websites. And it's kind of fascinating. I mean, one of the conclusions I have is that a very, very high proportion of tickets on this site do not exist. And so there's no incentive for Viagogo not to allow the listings because it makes them look flush with tickets. and obviously when they were about to embark on a very large IPO this was quite good but when you when you delve into it you go you're just looking at going like none of this makes any earthly sense so this is just really random by the way literally two minutes before we joined the call I was like actually I'll just go and have a look at some small venues so I've got say Brutonel Social Club 17th of January there's a Steely Dan cover band called Nearly Dan playing the venue great cover band name on viagogo there are four ticket listings of six tickets each um three of them are 129 pounds i mean you know i'm already thinking there's this is not the market price for a steamy dan cover band i'm i'm fairly sure this gig's probably not sold out and there's also a ticket for five thousand three hundred and ninety five thousand these are all these are all being listed by the same seller which if i go through viagoga is called the d dinho company so there's actually there's two two so there's two tickets here if i buy them would be 10 793 pounds so so you've got you've got you've got about 20 tickets in total um 18 of them are selling for whatever it was 100 and something pounds and then the two for the 5 000 pounds if i look at the trader information which takes a long time to get through, it's a business based in Poland, apparently.

18:05So you're looking at this objectively and thinking, right, you've got an event, which is probably not particularly high demand, but there's no reason for ticket tapping to exist. You've got somebody based in Poland, listing 20 tickets at prices that no one's going to pay, including one for 5 ,000, and this is quite normal on Viagogo. So you kind of go, once you go, I did some research with the daily record newspaper a few weeks ago looking at listings in scotland and you know there's like five less than five percent of tickets are listed by consumers and of the 95 that are listed by businesses like there's very few scottish touts so they weren't they weren't very well covered but they're kind of from here there and everywhere and that included touts in america who are listing like 2 000 tickets in an 800 cap venue like it's just they've just lost control but you the way you dig into it you just start going these tickets don't exist like this whole company is predicated on kind of i think it was the action fraud report earlier this year which i think showed about 1.6 million of like people frauded out tickets just this year um it came out around the time of the oasis tickets in glastonbury and i'll link to it in the description of the show because i i thought what action fraud discovered was quite it wasn't just that secondary ticketing is bad which that's my point of view um but the the people are using these sites to defraud people and and also using sites that look similar to stop up and via gogo and i think the argument that people will go on the black market to me doesn't seem like a correct yes some people will do because they just want to get hold of a ticket and they don't realize it's a scam and like pretty much any artist that you go on their facebook page if they're talking about live shows someone is in the replies saying i've got four tickets for sale for this show dm me if you want them and almost all of those are a scam and you go on most event pages on facebook and it's the same and facebook has got a huge huge problem with scam adverts like there was a report just came out meta making i think it was billions a year in in scam ad income and it's like so they're not really incentivized when they take a cut of the advertising revenue and all of these things feel like this is what governments are for they're here to protect us um and i guess we've got some agencies at the moment like off what and off com and all these different regulators do you think we'll enter a point where we'll have a ticket regulator is that sort of where things feel like they might be headed so so so i think where it's headed now is is that the when when when so So when Fanfare was set up, there was kind of these sites, there was zero transparency on these sites.

20:50It was like peer to peer transactions where you can't see who's buying it. So you can't see selling and you can't see anything about the ticket, whether it's seated or anything like that. It's blind basically. So again, it's impossible to measure. Soon after we started the campaign, this competition, the markets authority, the CMA, they started an investigation into the market. soon found out. I mean, you would have needed a law degree to see that there was no compliance at all with any consumer law. So they then started to take some actions. They forced, so Ticketmaster at that time were involved.

21:22They owned two sites and eBay owned StubHub. So they all had to sign legal undertaking saying, you know, we will not break the law or, you know, face sanctions. Vigogo, always the problem child, refused to do that, carried on touting, eventually served with a court order, and then threatened with contempt of court because they just refused to change. And finally, when it gets to the last moment, as they always do, finally make a few changes, get through the process, and then after exhausting the CMA's money, patience and everything else, just kind of revert back to type again. And I think that that's kind of been the problem here is that the CMA have not really had the tools to enforce.

22:01They can kind of get compliance to a degree, but they can't you know that they haven't taken any prosecution so even though this site is literally i mean i mean certainly when fanfare set was set up there was no listing that was compliant with consumer law so you could say that they they probably rinsed hundreds of millions of pounds out of consumers you know unlawfully reselling tickets um what what's changed now is that um there was a digital markets competition and consumers bill last year and that's given the CMA some new powers. So instead of having to go to court and raise court orders and chase companies that are breaking consumer law that way, they can now not go to court and prosecute themselves.

22:49So kind of like a fast track system. And that's actually interestingly one of the things that's been announced today is the CMA I have now launched. They're looking at 100 companies that are investigating eight of which include Viagogo and StubHub. And again, I will be, and again, given the volume of evidence, I've personally fed into the CMA about this kind of stuff and just the nearly Dan kind of stuff. This kind of stuff is just rife. You know, it's very common to see via go-go sellers listing, you know, because they have to show the seat numbers. You can still see the same tickets in Ticketmaster.

23:22So it's like they're reselling tickets that haven't actually been sold in the first place. I mean, again, all this stuff is really, really common. And again, it feels to me it wouldn't be that hard if you wanted to prosecute to find fairly large-scale examples of fraud. It feels pretty kind of indemnity. So I think how that process rolls out now will be pretty fascinating. I thought it was quite interesting. I was curious when Billie Eilish was playing. She did quite a few nights of the O2, and I was like, oh, I wonder if there's any tickets left, because I was thinking it's a lot of nights. Surely she can't have sold out completely.

23:54And there were like two or three tickets, and they were um like one of them was a disabled ticket so obviously i couldn't buy that because i'm assuming i would have need to have proved that i needed the special access when i arrived but when i went on google one of the secondary ticketing links came up pretty much looked like the same ticket that was already available on the website which you could buy from them which i'm assuming they would automatically then purchase which seemed kind of wrong i guess one of the things that i've read a few times is that a lot of organized crime is involved in a lot of these bot networks and obviously we've got a government that keep talking about smashing the gangs with human trafficking do they need to smash the gangs of these ticketing companies like and is it just too global for the uk government to really do anything about it so i think that and again i think that this is all in the press release but two two interesting parts one one is is that as well as you know ticketing platform is include social media platform as well so that's going to presumably mean facebook marketplace x etc etc um from conversations with government you know how it's been presented to us and again this is something we've been pushing for is that is that it has to be any any site that's targeting uk consumers has to abide by um you know uk consumer law that's been a loophole with football tickets so because the law because the law it goes back to 1994 pre-internet what you find with football is is that sites just set themselves up in spain or Dubai they target um you know they buy google ads and again it it it's pretty it's pretty basic this stuff these are all legacy businesses you need to supply the tickets or make up the tickets we can all list you know hundreds of tickets we don't actually possess no one's going to stop us and then you pay millions in it to buy search ads and so and you know and it's it's like clockwork Because five minutes before a pre-sale starts, they're at the top of Google search.

25:47So I think for those of us who buy a lot of tickets, I think we kind of, it's almost like we just probably just navigate this stuff of like, you know, we almost don't see it. We know what we're looking for. I think it's for those people who don't buy tickets very often, especially as well. A lot of them, I think, are probably victims of this market. They actually don't realize that they're being ripped off. They think they're on an official site because they're clicking through Google. What's the brand that you should look for on a ticketing website to avoid being scammed? And is it stuck? I mean, it's probably Star, really.

26:17That's the Society of Ticket Agents and Retailers. So that, but you could just input that image on there and not be part of it. Possibly. I mean, again, I've had a lot of conversations with Google about this. I mean, Google in 2019 delist Viagogo from their ad networks. I mean, Viagogo's traffic just went down a bit like their share price is doing at the moment. and actually I've actually proposed a few things to them in the past they actually for some financial products to reduce fraud they've got some of these schemes and templates where if you want to you need to be FCA regulated to be able to take out an advert which is good because it reduces Google's liabilities and it means that consumers are being served you know bona fide products and my thoughts then was like well why don't you just have if you're taking adverts from ticket companies why don't you um you know just take them from star members then at least you know they're going to be reputable they're part of a you know they're part of a adjudication service and all the rest of it um that hasn't flied and i think that's the unfortunate thing and again with the price cap hopefully now we can get google to be you know kind of a good citizen you know just like stop taking money from these road companies stop directing people to like the wrong place you're a search engine you know if this was if this was google maps and you wanted to go to Burnley and you're sending people to Bournemouth it's like this this isn't what this isn't working properly so I kind of hope that they also get on board now and again it's just kind of hopefully kind of almost rewiring how how tickets are presented so I thought you know again I kind of hope when people are buying tickets in the future they're going to know what the ticket entitles them to do if they want to resell it it's easy you go here you do this you don't go over here don't go to social media and you know and the ticket itself you know they're quite they're quite basic products i think there's a lot more that a ticket could potentially become in the future as well and um i think that kind of the wider thing which has always interested me is that there's always been so much and you'll appreciate this from you know from your journalism background that when a lot of people talk about the music industry they think of the recorded music industry they don't actually think about live whatsoever even though live is more exciting bigger more important often worth more to the economy because the amount of other things people do when they go to a show?

28:33Absolutely and people engage more passionately, you know people queue around the block still for live, you know again that excitement that you know gets monetized and makes the you know greases the world of business and everything else but actually and again you know I mean my mum who knows nothing about music would probably have heard of Napster and Pirate Bay and Fileshow but actually the impacts of digitization and online commerce and life has been as impactful. Again, I can remember the days, my first shows, I sat in for Stamped Addressed Envelope, a ticket came back, it was pretty basic. But the process of actually buying a ticket online through your phone, it's kind of incredible how all of this has changed live music.

29:15Obviously, touting is the bad side of that, but it'd be nice if we can kind of re-engage with some of that excitement that first happened with that, with that, just without all this shit in the background, really, and this kind of noise and, and distraction, and just made the whole process a lot easier. Again, ticket companies have to spend loads of money on anti bot technology, trying to, you know, manage these kinds of systems, waiting rooms, and it's all it's all under such stress and strain. So again, the cap is not going to fix all of that. But again, I'm hoping it will, you know, kind of help alleviate some of it, and we might kind of move on.

29:50and uh yeah progressed to a more exciting and interesting place i guess it's odd that entertainment tickets because this covers theater and some sport tickets as well doesn't it this this new regulation yeah um why like if someone bought up all the train tickets for me to go into london tomorrow and i had to buy from a secondary ticketing site the government would have acted much faster like for instance i don't know if there is anything to stop some but i don't think there's a allocation to the number of tickets per train and with flights if you were to do it there's like terrorism implications and you would have thought for instance after the batter clan like knowing who's got access to a show i mean i don't think those guys with machine guns needed tickets to get into the venue but um sorry i've been a bleak thing to make light of but the the idea like i remember like around that time there being some checks with identity to go to like a show at the the roundhouse or something and i don't know it seems to me like our id and all the kind of government kind of like tracking elements of checking your identity you are you say you are when you get a ticket like glastonbury does things with passports and things like that doesn't it to try and stop people from reselling tickets it yeah i guess it's is it that like you've obviously lobbied for these changes for years is it just that people don't take the music industry or the entertainment industry or the creative industries as seriously as aerospace even though the music industry is worth more than that it's a good question um i don't know i mean again i again it's i mean it's interesting i mean from my own perspective obviously i'm working with a lot of managers and artists who care really deeply about this and have been trying to again first of all devise strategies where again you were dealing with this completely non-transparent system it's very hard to kind of fight it and then the more transparency you have the easier it is to kind of make those strategies successful.

31:42And it's fascinating now seeing businesses like, you know, Open Stage, Planet Fans, Lalo. I mean, again, these are kind of direct-to-fan services. They're like verifying that you're a fan, you say you are. Exactly, exactly, exactly, exactly. And I've met, you know, I've met the ones with the kind of, you know, identifying your iris or your fingerprints. All of that stuff's kind of there. And it will be more about making the fan experience better. And I kind of think that as a result of that, ticket touting will be harmed that business. Because again, it's about taking someone's online identity or offline identity and sort of merging it, making sure they are an actual person.

32:19And again, it's kind of, again, it's an interesting space. I'm at an open stage of just working with Hayley Williams on her UK shows. And again, it's fascinating. It's not going to work for everyone. But again, there's different services, different models. And I kind of think that, again, it's not rocket science. Like obviously, if you've got fan bases, you want to look after them, care for them. It's not about rinsing people. It's just finding the people who are passionate about it and identifying. So it's kind of all part of that conversation I think as well, kind of within the music industry I think.

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33:35Does this feel real yet? You've obviously dedicated so much time and energy to campaigning around this. Has it actually sunk in what's happening and that this might move forward? Yeah, I mean, I'm not like a, you know, in a way, maybe not like a typical campaigner. I mean, I definitely view myself as a turkey voting for Christmas, as in like, I don't want the campaign to go on forever. We could be, you know, you could be looking, finding touts under the bed forever. so I think I think you know again I'm really keen to kind of end this campaign and it kind of feels like we need to get the legislation you know we need to get into the king's speech and get that started that's that's still probably going to take 12 to 14 months I believe so people with more experience these things tell me so I think there's still some time before it gets into effect I think there's still a big job for the music industry you know it's not you know like anything else you can't expect government to fix all your problems whether it's businesses or people so you know this reset happens it's absolutely vital that the music industry changes how they resell how they sell tickets you need again all that stuff has to be made clear but again there's a really big opportunity now of capturing a market which was you know again these could have been hypothetically some of the highest spending fans of music and you don't know who they are they're all buying in this kind of like off off grid basically um and they're all paying far too much money most most of the time buying from you know criminals a lot of the time but actually you've got you've now got the opportunity to kind of bring them inside treat them properly and you know nurture that relationship so kind of hope that that is where we move forward with all of this whether that happens or not i don't know but again if they either back to me this is a really big opportunity for the live music business to kind of develop because i know there's the vip key ticket element and like the idea of paying it forward is something that exists in lots of different areas so like you could be subsidizing someone else's ticket if you're wealthy like that could be a nice thing that the artist could be doing like i i spoke to dice about this a while ago because they had some initiatives that some smaller promoters were testing out of like you could pay 50 pounds for your ticket so that someone else could get a five pound ticket or they could be donated to food banks or um and there's there's some different things that are out there where there's obviously like you said there's a lot of money on the table if someone wants to go have a five course meal in a nice restaurant at the venue and they could buy a ticket the night before but they want to spend two grand on that then that money should be going into the music industry into the venues into because the more successful even the biggest venues are the more that does help the industry and might remove those bizarre three pound fifty venue you support fees on a Wembley arena ticket or the bizarreness of like the booking fee being more expensive, the more expensive ticket is like, but surely it's the same job of just selling a ticket to one person.

36:26There's still quite a lot of things that are out there that are kind of unfair to fans and confusing and corporate power not being kind of regulated. And I think the survey that Sam Duckworth led as well, it was super fascinating. It's really, really fascinating. And obviously, Kevin Brenner has now picked that up and there'll be this kind of fans review. I mean, there's loads about ticketing in that, loads about secretary ticketing as well. It's actually, funnily enough, one of the things I've talked to the CMA about quite a lot, because I actually don't think they've ever commissioned any consumer research around ticketing.

37:01So again, they're trying to regulate a market where they actually don't really understand how, what consumers understand about this market or how they navigate it. And which have been doing a lot of work to hopefully fill some of those gaps, haven't they? Which magazine? Yes. And again, that's been good, you know, definitely good having them on board as well. You know, again, so it's like it feels like, I mean, certainly around the cap. And again, you know, I have to give a shout out to Sharon Hodgson as well. I mean, Sharon, so Sharon's the Labour MP for Gateshead South and Washington. she's the chair of the all-party group on ticket abuse i mean she laid a private members bill to introduce the price cap in 2010 so there's kind of a bit of a sliding doors moment it got philly bust and talked out by a conservative mp called philip davis who's sort of well known for being sort of in the gambling lobby and things like that and it's just like you know had that had that gone through 15 years ago we could have been in a far different place i think um we also had Sajid Javid is culture secretary, didn't he?

37:58He said the ticket touts were just good entrepreneurs. And that meant that these changes weren't going to happen. Exactly. So it's kind of been it has been through this kind of weird process. And again, but saying that, you know, again, with with with Fanfare that, you know, there has been there was a conservative and be called Nigel Adams, who's pretty, pretty far to the right of the party. But he got burned by in Green Day tickets. And he was, you know, again, really admittance like, no, this is this is a black market. again he kind of understood and i think that kind of that some of that cross party alliance has been kind of quite important now i want to know if those tickets were for him or for his kids i kind of like the idea he's got either got really rebellious kids or he's really not listened to green day's lyrics i think there's there's probably a tory headbangers joke in there or something possibly but um but um but yeah but but again it's something that i think a lot of mps probably get a lot of complaints from constituents about as well um um and you know tickets can be quite an emotional purchase I think as well and you know if you do get burned or the tickets are fake I think it's it's quite a shaming thing I think for a lot of people as well you know you turn up at a venue with friends or you know partner and then they don't work and it's like oh I bought them from this site or I bought them from you know social media or something like that so yeah so it's a it's a yeah it's a funny it's a it's a it's a funny slice of the music industry um but yeah i mean hopefully going forward it will just be easier to resell a ticket and hopefully some of this noise you know it's not going to eradicate touting completely and i'm sure those lovely gentlemen that you mentioned before i mean i said i can spot them a mile away at football you know when i turn up at west ham you can just see them you know you can just spot them a mile off like football tickets meant to be protected for hooliganism reasons aren't they as well and it's like it's amazing that that's not enforced so i guess one last question for you is what can music fans do to chivvy this along should they be hounding their MPs should they just be paying attention should artists be making more noise because we know what happens with a lot of these bills they sort of they make the headlines today and then they sort of drift away over the the slow grinding process of the House of Lords and bills going backwards and forwards to Parliament like is there anything the fans do you think the fans could do around this yeah i mean it's funny because i've been kind of um again like i say my my ambition is not to be doing this for the next 10 years it is to kind of conclude it quite soon so i probably need to come up with a bit of a strategy of you know now we've got this you know it's been a long time to kind of get it we are going to do this obviously the next bit is getting it to get the legislation in train um i kind of think once once that's happened you know it's like the lib dems also support this the SMP also support this I think there's a lot of conservative MPs that also support this I kind of don't think there'll be obviously there should be scrutiny of it and make sure it works works properly and we're thinking about all of that but in terms of opposition I'm not saying like there being loads of opposition to this so hopefully it should you know once it gets on the roller coaster it should hopefully you know proceed yeah and again so so hopefully it won't be required to have you know a massive push but saying that if it doesn't go into the king's speech and we're still here in two years time and i'm feeling a bit depressed thinking like i could be campaigning on something else um then maybe then maybe we will i mean i think it's been the the letter that was published last week i think having you know obviously there was a lot of big artists involved radiohead it was some pretty big names wasn't it yeah there's some pretty big names and i know So, you know, again, it's, it's a, you know, I know it's really, it's always hard for artists, artists always getting asked to sign letters that always asking to, and it's, you know, you know, not every artist is an activist, not every artist feels comfortable about talking about things.

41:45I think as a whole, most artists want to take care of their fans. They want to price that they want to set their ticket prices away. Obviously they want to make money, but they want to be inclusive and accessible and all those kinds of things. And I think having that a feeling like you had that agency taken away from you and then you've got these twacks saying oh you're just not you take your underpricing your tickets they should be at market price and this is not nebulous idea of what you know market price is nobody i mean it's like i think one the other thing i mean one of the fine things that i've learned with ticketing is that it attracts economists and it attracts lawyers it attracts lawyers because it can be hard to define what a ticket is um so the likes of viago will say it's like a banana or a car it's it's something you own it's yours you can do what you like with it.

42:27Whereas we'd probably interpret it as a bit more, something more intangible, like money, like it's a license to go into a show. And it also attracts economists because again, this idea of, you know, market price or underpricing your tickets, very rarely overpricing your tickets, always underpricing your tickets. And somehow the artists and managers are somehow, you know, not shrewd business people because they're not going to rinse every last cent out of their audience. Whereas they're obviously got longer term strategies i think so i think i think there's something yeah i don't know i think there's something that riles a lot of artists that they see their fans being exploited by people who you know don't have their i think it's that thing like i don't think fans necessarily like understand that you set a price point based on being able to sell the maximum number tickets in that venue and that includes the people that aren't on 50 60 grand a year it's the people that are on 23 three grand a year that were just scraping by a minimum wage which would require five billion five million streams to make that amount of money for a musician and the idea that like below Brixton Academy level most artists are just about breaking even like you move up just a step and you've got to do more production and like the costs of doing a show jump and that's a lot more mouth to feed when you're on the road and if you can only tour between Thursday and Saturday because in lots of cities you can't play shows you've then got to pay to keep those people available and on the road and like so sometimes the pricing is hard to factor in because if you were doing four nights at the o2 then yeah that's great and you're going to make quite a lot of money but if you're doing two nights at bricks and academy and you only half sell the second one then not everyone's making that much money similarly you buy loads of merch and you only sell 70 of it but the last 30 was your profit so it's like there's loads of ways artists are not quite making enough to especially now we've got loads of solo artists that got to pay for session musicians all these other things anyway that's probably a whole other episode to get into the economics of live music yeah and i thought i think you know i think there's one of those things where you know a lot of um people in policy industry talk about you know the pipeline the talent pipeline.

44:44I'm not that fond of that phrase personally, but there's also like the fan pipeline as well. And I think sometimes that doesn't really get enough attention. It's like, if you're not, you know, it's obsession with like, you know, who's going to be the sound of 2027 or 2028, you know, been this new thing before possibly before things have developed properly. But it's so important to have a pipeline of fans. And if you're, if they're being priced out, ripped off, not being or unable to enter a venue because they're too it's like an awful lot more needs to be done i think to kind of nurture those people you know again i mean when my kids go and go to football they're bombarded with you know one pound seats you know whatever you know they're just from a very early age they are they're treated pretty well and they're kind of enticed in i don't really think i see that in music quite as much um and it and it really how often is there a three o 'clock on a saturday afternoon show that's all ages like those kind of first experiences even of just of your grassroots venue in fact i'll end on this um i was with the anchoress last week and she played at the horn inst albans a warm-up for playing union chapel and this guy came along and i think i met him at the merch desk before i think he bought a few things and he came with his daughter and it was her first grassroots gig the only gig she'd been to before was the arctic monkeys and taylor swift so she's seen these two huge shows and she just saw the anchor s play in a room of what 100 people because it's not a very big venue it's a little nice little venue inst albans and um she was getting her record signed and she was just talking about how exciting it was to like hear and feel the music and like that is something which as much as the music industry is makes huge sums of money like last week we had tom keel from uk music talking about the eight billion that the uk music industry made and for me as a manager i'm not making money on the anchoress playing a show at the horn and spending from midday until midnight working on that show and but that moment of just hearing someone go that like you could see and i remember when i first saw a grassroots show having only been to big shows before your dna changes like you you want another fix of seeing a band play that close up playing that well that you might think whoa if i ever see them and they're really big i was in that room at that time and i think that i would pay that the huge sums of money that people pay now to to like buy a three grand ticket or whatever is the ridiculous sums people pay to see some of the artists that i saw when they were big play those tiny venues and i think that's the bit for me that how do we bring people in we need skills we need it's like you said it's that fan pipeline like where's the upselling like if you could get 50 pounds off a ticket to the o2 because you've bought two tickets to go see a kick at the lexington and the scala like how do we make that work how there's so much money that's currently being taken by these kind of criminal gangs and offshore organizations like that's a huge huge amount of money which could be going into media to help people understand what's going on in music which could be going into building platforms for live music fans like making it so that you can authenticate like tesco club card for music fans all these things which could exist not tesco but obviously just like authenticating that you're a true music fan and that you get credits to get get to the front of the queue i i mean i mean to be fair i think with some of these some of these new kind of fan platforms i kind of hope that that's where they go and it kind of makes it kind of can make things more interesting exciting again i think as well and you know not just a kind of a cookie cutter experience of you know entering a show kind of thing you know that you can reward people i mean again like i say with something like football you kind of the more the more you go and participate the more you're reward you're rewarded i don't really get that with um you know i mean there's some of those sort of us taylor swift shows where you know it's like you have to buy the expensive sweatshirt to get the code it just seems to be the antithesis of it's kind of the antithesis of kind of rewarding you know your your kind of like core fan and enthusiast who you know are obviously doing the missionary work outside as well and you know and and kind of yeah sharing their their um I loved those gigs where if you did a beach clean, you got on the ticket, you got like ticket codes and things.

49:06Those artists did those a while ago. Like, let's bring that back.

49:18I have a lot of takeaways from that episode. I think the biggest one is if you're not in the UK, hopefully there is some hope there that this could happen where you live. and I think that if you are in the UK as we discussed briefly I think there's a lot that we probably need to think about how we keep the pressure on how we ensure this goes through how we ensure that the legislation isn't weak and the companies actually get dealt with because I think as we've seen with water Ofwatt have not done a brilliant job at stopping sewage going into our rivers and seas and as we've seen with Ofcom there are some awful stuff that gets broadcast and written in our newspapers and the press regulation in this country is not what the legislation says it should be.