McCartney Tickets Prompt Japan Scalping Debate

McCartney’s three Tokyo Dome concerts, slated for the middle of November, sold out almost immediately after going on sale in September.

The highest face price for a ticket is 16,500 yen ($169), but tickets on the Yahoo auction site are going for as high as 400,000 yen ($4,100).

What’s especially unnerving to some is that these high prices have not been arrived at through the usual bidding process.

The seller is simply setting a very high price and people are paying it.

This realization has led to calls for regulation of ticket prices on auction sites. Rockin’ On, the magazine that sponsors and puts on Rock In Japan, the country’s biggest summer music festival, says that net auctions have become a problem, since the festival sells out fairly quickly and the audience is typically young, meaning they don’t have the money to pay the kind of prices online scalpers demand.

Rockin’ On president and veteran music critic Yoichi Shibuya says tickets for the festival should go to “people who really want to go” but instead are ending up in the hands of people “who can be called scalpers.”

Shibuya says that Yahoo is shirking its responsibility by inadvertently helping scalpers fleece young music lovers.

Local laws limit scalpers hanging around venues selling secondhand tickets, and many believe there should be laws limiting what scalpers can charge on the Internet.

A professor of economics at prestigious Waseda University told the Asahi Shimbun newspaper that complaints about online scalpers ignore one vital component, namely the market.

Who is to say that the person who shells out 400,000 yen for a ticket to the McCartney show is any less a fan of the ex-Beatle than someone who claims to be but can’t afford that price?

If the scalpers can get that much money for a single ticket, it means that the face prices of the tickets were too low to begin with.

In essence, tickets sold online will fetch their “natural” market price, whereas prices set by the promoters and venues can be artificially low, depending on the artist.

The real problem, he says, is that if tickets were actually sold this way, it would reflect badly on the artist, especially rock artists who tend to have the image of being heroes for the average person.