Ticketmaster in £600 rip-off row over touts’ seats for Phil Collins
TICKETMASTER has been accused of profiteering by potentially pocketing more than £600 on tickets sold by touts for Phil Collins concerts.
Seats for the tour sold out on Ticketmaster in seconds last month, with many booked by touts who sell them on for inflated prices.
Ticketmaster’s website now redirects fans to a re-selling site it owns called Get Me In! where the seats – originally priced at £55 to £175 – sell for up to £2,200.
The firm then takes huge cuts on the markups for tickets. The Daily Mail has found for each ticket sold for £2,200 – the highest on offer – the company claims £611.59.
MPs accused Ticketmaster of ‘manipulating’ the market, saying the firm must ‘come clean’ and put fans before profit. The company is expected to be hauled before the Culture, Media and Sport select committee.
Collins, 65, is playing a five-night residency at the Royal Albert Hall in June, followed by two dates in Paris and two in Cologne.
Terms and conditions show Get Me In! takes a 10 per cent cut from the seller, then adds 15 per cent of the full sale price plus VAT as a processing fee. Tickets sent to UK addresses incur another £10.57 delivery fee.
So for £2,200 Phil Collins tickets – in the front row on the Friday night – the seller would make £2,000, Get Me In! would take £611.59 and the buyer would pay £2,611.59 in total. The seller of these tickets is not known, as Get Me In! protects their identities.
Tory MP Nigel Adams, of the committee, said: ‘People will ask questions as to the conflict of interest with Ticketmaster earning [from] secondary ticketing sites. Genuine fans are missing out.’ Labour MP Sharon Hodgson, of the parliamentary group on ticket abuse, said: ‘There are questions that need to be answered by Ticketmaster about the relationship between the two branches of their business. [It] needs to … be seen to be doing much more to stop the abuse.’
But Warwick University’s Professor Michael Waterson, who wrote a government review calling for prosecution of touts, said it was not in the firm’s interest to crack down on them.
A petition to enforce sanctions on resale sites and require them to reveal identities has more than 53,000 signatures. Accounts report Get Me In! made £2.5million profit over the past two years. It paid no tax in either of the years.
Ticketmaster said it was ‘committed to the overall ticket buying process to ensure artists get tickets into the hands of fans’. Collins declined to comment.