| A Primer on the Online Secondary Ticket Market |
| 08.21.09 | |
Unless you’ve plenty of time, getting hold of a ticket for a sports event or music gig is never easy. For example, the whole 2,500,000 tickets were snapped up for the up-and-coming U2 tour of the US. So just how can a person who’s got a full time job get their hands on a ticket if they’re selling out so quickly?
Go to the second-hand market.
In the dismal days before the internet, you had to buy your second-hand ticket through a dodgy tout at the event itself. This inevitably meant paying double or triple the face value, or even possibly handed bogus tickets which would inevitably be spotted as you entered the event - meaning you miss the music gig or sports event while wasting your money by being conned.
However, things have improved for sports and music lovers. The secondary ticket market has cleaned up its act in the last 10 years or so, with much thanks to the internet. These days there is a huge amount of competition to resell tickets on the internet, the industry has become self-regulating. You’re selling the ticket for HOW much?! I’ll look elsewhere! And so many ticket sellers provide very cheap insurance if the event / gig is called off. And with stiff competition online, secondary tickets have become cheaper to the point that it can sometimes be you’re not paying a lot more than the actual initial price of the ticket.
Nowadays you can buy tickets for many sorts of sports events and concerts. From cricket to soccer to basketball matches, to getting your hands on decent seats for your favourite band; resale tickets offer up a second chance to attend the event you want to go to. How can you get tickets online? Use a search engine like Google and key in your keyphrase like X Factor tickets, and you will find a large array of secondary ticket agents who can sell that ticket to you.
Not everyone is happy with secondary tickets however. For example, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails calls secondary ticket agents “parasites”, and he’d like to see an end to the resale of event tickets. However, he’s missing the point of resold tickets : people simply do not have the time to queue up for tickets. They’re more likely working when the tickets are on sale, and physically cannot be in the right place at the right time to get hold of the ticket they want in that precious 60 or so minutes it takes for an entire tour to sell out.
While there is strong competition between secondary ticket agents, we believe this is a much needed service for true fans who were unable to buy the tickets the first time around.
