Sabottka ‘Disappointed’ With Ticketmaster

MCT Agentur chief Scumeck Sabottka, who says he terminated his contract with TM after finding tickets for his shows on the Seatwave site, told Pollstar the parent company either can’t or doesn’t want to do anything about it.

A year ago Sabottka signed a deal with Live Nation Entertainment-owned TM, which has subsequently acquired Seatwave. Although MCT and TM released a joint statement pledging to protect fans and artists from unauthorised resellers, Sabbotka wasn’t able to stop tickets for his Katy Perry and Jonathan Jeremiah shows being sold for inflated prices on Seatwave.

The world’s largest ticketing company – which also owns the GetMeIn secondary platform – said in a statement: “Seatwave is a ticket marketplace that responds to what fans want – the ability to buy and resell tickets when tickets are no longer available on the primary market or ticket holders can no longer use their tickets. “Ticket holders set the price and list their tickets for resale, not Ticketmaster.”

Ticketmaster Germany chief exec Klaus Zemke has not responded to a Pollstar request for comment. This isn’t Sabottka’s first battle with Seatwave, having fared better when preventing the secondary site from selling Robbie Williams tickets for more than face value. He had BDV, the country’s major promoters’ association, send cease and desist letters to Seatwave, which then removed all Williams tickets on sale for beyond face value.

In 2010 Sabottka took the unprecedented step of personalising the tickets for Take That’s German stadium dates in a bid to stamp out what he referred to as the “mafia system” of secondary ticketing. It meant checking 150,000 tickets and IDs as fans queued to get into the shows at Hamburg Imtech Arena, Düsseldorf Esprit Arena and Munich Olympiastadion. “It makes no sense to implement such an elaborate system if you don’t enforce it,” he said in an interview with Süddeustche Zeitung.

Sabottka told the German paper that foiling scalpers by issuing personalised tickets “worked wonderfully” when Germany staged the 2006 World Cup. He said he was just applying the same principle to a live music event.