There is an excellent post by Martin Cloonan on live music ticketing on the live music exchange. It reads as follows

On Thursday 23 February Channel 4’s Dispatches programme was entitled The Great Ticket Scandal. In it Channel 4 reporters went under cover to investigate what happens at two leading “fan exchange” sites, Viagogo and Seatwave. They found that contrary to the sites’ claims that they are simply a mechanism for fans to mutually exchange tickets, in reality they are clearing houses for a combination of semi professional and professional touts and promoters who sold direct to these “secondary” ticket agents. It was alleged that the biggest concert promoter in the world, Live Nation, is amongst those selling directly to the secondary market and thus benefitting from sales of ticket at prices which are well above the face value. The fallout from this seems set to continue.

What was at stake in the programme was two things. The first is fairness. Here fans who were at box offices and online at exactly the time that tickets went on sale were allegedly denied them because promoters had already sold chunks of primary tickets direct to the secondary market. This was portrayed as a well-established, routine, practice. Secondly, came deception. Both the sites claimed to be fan to fan, but evidence suggested that genuine fan exchange accounts were a maximum of a third of the sites’ business. In addition in cases where Viagogo was not being allocated tickets by the promoter, it used illicit means (such as multiple credit card buying) to buy tickets on the primary market which it then sold through its own website. In both cases the seller was not another fan, but the site itself. Considerable sums of money could be made here, the sites and promoters were alleged to be complicit in the deception, although no acts were named as benefitting from it.

To read the rest of the post – click the link below.  My big question is this – how does this relate to Wales?

Mastering Tickets.