Team Adele busts ticket-touts

18,000 touts have been prevented from selling Adele’s 2016 tickets

Not only capable of shifting a quantity of records that is normally unheard of in 2015 (4 million in one week, and counting), Team Adele have now managed to combat ticket touts for her forthcoming 25 tour. According to Music Business Worldwide , Adele’s management used experts who excluded more than 18,000 “known or likely touts” from the ticket buying process for the singer’s 2016 36date tour. Around 15,000 of them were based in the UK and Europe. These touts were eliminated from the process before they even had a chance to buy tickets, with Adele’s manager, Jonathan Dickins, explaining that the process of pre-sale registration should be under more scrutiny. “The big problem here is legislation,” Dickins said. “Until a law is passed in the UK that outlaws ticket resale profiteering, you cannot stop it completely.”

Dickins said, “We were carefully monitoring all of the registrations to try and spot anything suspicious. This is a show for fans who’ve waited years for Adele to perform. Everyone working on it just wants the best outcome for those fans.” According to MBW, on 1 December, 1.9 per cent of the “first wave” of tickets ended up on secondary ticketing sites such as Stubhub, Viagogo, and the Live Nation owned GetMeIn! and Seatwave, with some being sold for over £1,000 (Dh5485.29).

Music Ally contrasted the number of Adele tickets that became available for resale with those of other big shows for sale on Seatwave, GetMeIn and StubHub, noting that while Adele averaged 54 tickets per show on secondary sites, Rihanna averaged 1,548 and Coldplay were at 2,939.

Songkick, which handled the Adele ticket sales, said, “Songkick provided the opportunity to allow fans to register, and to use its proprietary technology to identify touts, reduce their ability to purchase tickets when advance sales commenced on 1 December and to cancel as many tickets appearing on secondary ticketing sites as possible.”

Its statement continued: “Compared to other events, we believe these efforts helped to reduce resale by well over 50 per cent, increasing the amount of fans that can attend these shows. Ultimately, artists’ goals of ensuring 100 per cent of tickets end up in the right hands will depend on a combination of both technology and legislative action.

For example, the 2015 amendment of the UK’s Consumer Rights Act requires secondary sites to list the specific locations of their tickets for sale, which — if adopted properly — would allow for the full-scale cancellation of touts’ tickets. Until this happens, it is impossible to completely eliminate ticket touting.”