by Richard Kastelein

OP-ED - Andrew Blachman, general manager of TicketMaster's secondary ticket sales website, GetMeIn, told the BBC over the weekend that a large proportion of its sales are made by secondary ticket brokers, or touts as Phillip Kemp, a reporter for the Donal MacIntyre Show on BBC 5 Live, rather unaffectionately coins them.

"It's a roughly even split for most events on our site. There's people we think are frequent sellers in the marketplace, and then those who sell on a one-off 'can't go to the event' basis, or (someone who) buys a couple of extra tickets to fund their own experience" Blachman told BBC 5 Live's Donal MacIntyre programme. "What we do is we guarantee the transactions and we make sure the consumers who use the site to buy tickets get what they are promised."

"With or without us, they're still out there in the marketplace," said Blachman, arguing that Ticketmaster's GETMEIN! site had helped to clear up some of the shadier practices in the secondary industry.

A Seatwave representative went on to tell the BBC roughly 60% of the tickets on its website were listed by what it called 'consumer sellers', which it described as people who had never sold before or who had only sold a small number of tickets.

What about fans who miss the presale' or sale online due to work commitments and are willing to pay premium price to go? They don't want the hassle of trying to buy tickets for an hour online? What about fans who are not sure they can even go when tickets go onsale and then find out later they can take the night off, and then buy tickets?

So that begs the question to Kemp and MacIntyre, what constitutes a tout?

Is the bloke who always buys six or eight tickets for every event he wants to go too, and uses two for him and his mate while selling the rest on eBay, GETMEIN!, Seatwave or Viagogo a tout or just a smart fan? Or a 'Consumer Seller' as likely named by Seatwave CEO Joe Cohen.

Is a tout' a broker who has a strong network with promoters, agents, managers, artists, players, advertisers or sponsors and gets blocks of tickets via the 'back door' and sells them for insiders who want to make more return on own inventory or is he just a middle man providing a service that has been around since pre-internet days...the current chairman of Ticketmaster Irving Azoff even admitted that 20 percent of primary tickets went out the back door to secondary traders before public sale to the US Senate last year.

Or is a tout' the guy with the trench coat outside the arena who hires college kids and street bums to wait in line for tickets or uses bot programs to bypass primary ticket site security online?

Kemp fails to address this most-important issue, and like most mainstream journalists, failed to really do his homework on the dynamics of the primary and secondary ticketing markets, relying on pathos, or trying to appeal to the reader's emotions,  rather than present a more objective point of view.  It appears that Andy Sinclair could not get tickets on the primary market online and complained. And it's the secondary ticketing industries fault for spurring on the supply and demand. 

Ultimately, the only reason the secondary ticketing market exists is because the primary ticketing market can not price effectively. 

Is scarcity being created artificially? Perhaps, if every punter is buying six tickets instead of two. But this is also called capitalism and reflects the way markets work. Event tickets are a luxury, not a right and the issues around tickets will only be solved once the primary ticketing industry or even artists and teams themselves figure out how to price dynamically and therefore reflect true market value.