Bring back queueing for tickets to beat the online touts
AS sure as day follows night and slightly shifty-looking British boys mope after Tay, they arrived: the stories of “outraged” Swifties left “devastated” as — once again — the Ticketmaster algorithm shat the bed and left them bereft while the Viagogos and StubHubs of the world mysteriously ended up with stacks of tickets to re-sell, within minutes, at sky high prices (seats for Taylor Swift’s Wembley shows with a face value of an already-steep £170 are now being flogged for £3,000).
Something could easily be done. Something should obviously be done. We have, though, been here before many times and know that nothing will actually be done.
Anyone who has ever been a superfan at some point in their life — ie, anyone with a pulse — would agree that the I’ll-do-whatever-it-takes obsessives (plus vicariously anxious parents) must be afforded the opportunity to 100 per cent guarantee their spot down the front. And there is a very simple quick fix to ensure this happens: namely old fashioned, in person, outside-the-venue queues. Put a few thousand tickets on sale at the bricks-and-mortar box offices, then allow the truly dedicated to turn up at 4am and stand (or sleep) in line until a 10am on-sale time.
This always used to happen. In August of 2001, five years on from their two nights in front of a quarter of a million people at Knebworth, tickets for Oasis at Shepherd’s Bush Empire (capacity: 2,000) went on sale. No way was the much younger me going to risk the phone-line lottery. So I headed down to the venue the Friday night before the Saturday morning they went on sale and joined an already-sizeable queue. Fifteen hours later, I had a face-value ticket. An ordeal? No, it was, aside from the inevitable goon with a guitar playing — well, take a guess — great fun. The guy who I ended up stood next to (hi, Giles) remains one of my best friends to this day. Weirdly, it turned out we had stuff in common.
That night-into-morning there were, of course, professional ticket touts stood in line too. But really, who wouldn’t take back those guys over the “sadly I can no longer make it” eBay brigade, sat in their bedrooms with their Amexes and their super-fast wi-fi? To my mind, anyone who puts in a 15-hour shift deserves their nice big mark-up as much as the devotees deserve the chance to look their idols in the eye. This way they get what they want, the superfans get what they need, and the rest of us escape a news feed clogged up with same-as-it-ever-was ticketing stories. • Hamish MacBain is deputy editor of ES Magazine