U2 fan club had ticket tout members who got a jump on the public, says Paul McGuinness
FORMER U2 manager Paul McGuinness has claimed ticket touts who take advantage of genuine fans are being given an ‘unfair’ advantage by promoters.
Mr McGuinness claimed that U2’s fan club contained a number of ticket touts.
It comes as all tickets to the 55,000-capacity Electric Picnic Festival sold out in two hours this week before any of the acts were even announced – a process that usually takes until mid-June to complete.
Touts have cashed in on the demand for tickets by selling them on secondary ticketing site Seat wave, a Ticketmasterowned company, with weekend camping tickets – originally priced between €160 and €200 – appearing on Seatwave for as much as €600 in recent days.
Earlier this month Mr McGuinness was interviewed by Dire Straits manager Ed Bicknell at a music conference. His comments were reported by Billboard magazine.
On the subject of secondary ticketing he said: ‘I know there’s a sense of unfairness in the air. People go online to buy a ticket and think they have an equal chance of getting that ticket. If two minutes later they see the same tickets being scalped, it’s a miserable feeling.’
He added: ‘You could say it’s unfair that members of the U2 fan club get a two-day jump on the rest of the public – knowing as they do that many members of U2.com are bot operators.’
Bot operators are individuals who use computer software programmes that enable them to access websites multiple times much faster than humans can.
Typically, touts would use these types of programmes to log on to sites in an effort to buy multiple quantities of tickets for events which would then be offered at higher prices when they are sold out.
Responding to Mr McGuinness’s comments, Noel Rock TD, who proposed a bill to outlaw the sale of tickets at inflated prices, said: ‘I think Paul has a better understanding of this than most. He knows that U2 and many other bands are always going to have concerts where demand outstrips supply.
‘By having a fan club mechanism in which people can effectively jump the queue by paying a fee, you hand touts an unbelievable advantage: pay a few quid to get to the top of the queue, snap up as many tickets as you can, sell them for 10 times the face value. Rinse and repeat.
‘It’s a huge problem and, last year, U2 themselves recognised it and actively sought to stamp it out by requiring the purchaser to present their purchasing debit card on entry to the venue, and restricting the number of tickets per person to two. It worked well. This year’s concert however has seen those lessons completely forgotten, which is a shame.’
Neither Mr McGuinness nor U2 responded to requests for comment.
‘You could say it’s unfair’