Tixdaq Launches Ethical Price Checker

U.K. Ticketing consultant Tixdaq has launched an "ethical price checker" for online ticket sites in a bid to help fans save money and ensure that artists get a slice of the secondary market cake.

The company, which specializes in live entertainment intelligence and promoting transparency, is pledging to share half its resale ticket profit with the acts performing the accompanying concerts.

It also says its new service will help resolve the controversy over secondary ticketing sites while hindering ones that exploit fans, deliver poor service and rob artists of potential revenues.

"When it became clear the government wasn’t going to regulate secondary ticketing, we set out to find a market-based solution to benefit the two most important parties in the equation, the music fan and the artist," Tixdaq founder Will Muirhead explained.

"Secondary ticketing platforms which match buyers and sellers are great in theory, but fans can easily end up paying over the odds if they don’t have information about what’s going on in the market as a whole.

"The Tixdaq price checker is a market solution to the problem," he said.

Muirhead cited a Dolly Parton gig at London’s O2 Arena in July for which near-identical Block A tickets currently range from £103 to £595.

"A diehard Dolly fan will obviously pay whatever it takes to see her, but would you really want to pay £492 more than you need to?" he asked.

"The British public spend over £900 million every year on concert tickets. By increasing transparency in the market we believe we can save the public millions of pounds a year."

Tixdaq will pay the artists’ share of its secondary sales profit to the Resale Rights Society (RSS), the organisation launched in December by the Music Managers Forum to raise standards of consumer protection in secondary ticketing and to ensure part of the proceeds go back to the artists.

"Artists want to ensure that fans don’t overpay for tickets and so we welcome the Tixdaq pricechecker service," said RRS chairman-designate Marc Marot. "As managers we obviously want our artists to get paid too. We hope that Tixdaq’s lead in looking out for artists’ interests is ultimately followed by the whole industry."

The Tixdaq 100 best-selling tickets on secondary ticketing platforms increased in value by 117 percent during the past three months, compared with a 6 percent increase for the FTSE 100 over the same period.

Tixdaq provides 24/7 monitoring of the price and availability of more than 125,000 tickets from the U.K.’s leading primary and secondary ticket agents, enabling fans to get the best available deal.