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‘If We’re Looking For A Solution To Ticketing, It’s About Working Together’: Q’s With Viagogo Global MD Cris Miller
Last month, UK’s Labour party leader Keir Starmer said, his party would cap the price charged for tickets on the secondary market in case of an election win – an announcement welcomed by many working in the UK live biz.
Viagogo, the leader on the secondary ticketing market, wouldn’t want to see resale prices capped, seeing that it takes a commission on tickets sold through its website. But, according to global managing director Cris Miller, an artificially imposed price cap wouldn’t just harm his own business, but consumers and music fans at large.
In this interview, he also touched on the notion that black markets emerge wherever access to in-demand products is restricted; cited examples of fans making a bargain on the secondary market, even on tickets for blockbuster tours; touched on the huge differences in ticketing between the U.S. and UK; and emphasized how important it was for the entire business to collaborate in order to come up with a satisfying solution to ticketing’s issues.
Pollstar: Is it legally possible to restrict someone from reselling a ticket they have purchased?
Cris Miller: Our position is, when someone buys a ticket, they have the right to resell it. I’ve been doing this for 25 years now, and this debate has gone on for ages. I understand the points of view, but, fundamentally, in what other industry do you buy something that you’re not allowed to resell?
I don’t believe that an individual fan of any event, anywhere in the world, would logically think that they can’t resell. [Imagine being] told by a car manufacturer, or a book seller that you can’t resell. It’s almost like a human right, a principle that most people all over the world believe in, and why the business has been so successful over the years. It goes beyond music and sport. I pay for something, I now own it, I get to resell it.
Opponents of for-profit resale state, the protection of fans is at the core of their efforts. Viagogo states that it can be harmful to fans to restrict the resale of tickets. Could you give a few examples of what you mean by that?
There’s evidence from different marketplaces across the world, where price caps, when instituted, create an underground market, a black market. Ticketing is complicated, there’s a lot of nuances to it, people in the music industry will understand this.
The passion people have for their favourite artists, or their favourite events, is subjective. My daughter loves Taylor Swift more than I do, therefore she’s valuing that experience higher than I do. The value of an event lies in the individual person’s point of view. When there are high demand events with limited supply, there’s inevitably going to be a resale market. And those are the ones where, typically, the price can go high.
In those instances, the fans are the most vulnerable. They’re the most vulnerable, because they have the highest degree of passion, and will do anything they can to get into this event. It may not be perfect, but the resale market can satisfy that. That’s what viagogo and StubHub do: we satisfy demand in those instances, when the supply is very limited, and the demand exceeds it. And that’s why, for us, it’s ultimately about protecting the fan in their purchase, to make sure that if they’re going to spend that money, they’re going to get a good service.
Price aside, we have millions and millions of people that use our website and are quite happy about that, because it gives them accessibility, an option to get in. You put a price cap on it, that transaction doesn’t disappear. It just goes underground. When there’s a significant amount of demand, people are still going to want to go to the event, you cannot regulate out demand. It’ll go underground, and that’s where the scams take place. That’s where the fraud takes place, because then people can get taken advantage of.
But when it’s directed through a platform that’s reputable, that has the guarantee in place, that has customer service, pays taxes – the whole thing – you’re effectively making sure that everybody’s safe and secure.
You mentioned evidence from other markets. Can you cite some?
The state of Victoria, Australia, passed a price cap about a year and a half ago, for Taylor Swift’s two shows in Melbourne. The police later reported that people were scammed out of some $260,000. Stolen. Gone. No recourse, no nothing. And that’s just what was reported.
When people have this much passion to go, they’re gonna do anything. Thus, you need a regulated platform like ours, so that everything can be tracked. We can ensure that if, god forbid, something goes wrong, we step in the middle of it, and take care of it.
Let me give you another really good example of the regulated market that we operate in the UK. When the pandemic happened, and people using our service found themselves all of a sudden in a situation where all these events got cancelled, we refunded all of that money: £300 million pounds plus of refunds. If you used eBay, if you used a classified listing site, if you went to social media, you were out of luck. Even some primary ticketing companies went out of business. A good actor to help manage this is really helpful to the industry, as much friction as there can be. Ensuring that people get into these events, ensuring that the seat is used, ensuring that they have a good experience – we believe that’s all positive.
The high-end, high-demand events you mentioned are a fraction of events that take place every day, across the world. The vast amount of shows that don’t sell out aren’t getting this kind of attention, and those are the shows, you might even pay below face value for a ticket. How important are those events to viagogo?
There’s a significant amount of such opportunities happening on our website. There’s this perception that everything is high price, which is just not true. What is more, the demand for events can evolve. Demand will be at its peak when tickets hit the on-sale, but it’s not a normal reflection of what tickets can and will go for. Fans should wait for the demand to settle to find a listing that matches their budget. Beyoncé’s 2023 “Renaissance” tour is a great example, tickets to see her in the UK went for as low as £24.
Same thing for The 1975, who played here at The O2 not too long ago: tickets were in the £10 to £12 range. This just happens, it’s just a matter of the marketplace being volatile. There’s all these factors that can contribute to that, and we don’t know all of them, but a lot of it has to do with whether the demand is there, or the supply is there, or not.
The vast majority of events, especially music, don’t sell out. We can help try to sell more of these events out. There’s a misperception that we only do resale. In the United States, StubHub is actually a very meaningful primary ticketing channel for a lot of sports teams. In music, we’d love to be in a position to help sell what’s at the box office. But this requires collaboration, finding ways to work together.
In today’s ticketing system, you pick one ticketing provider, you have one store, and hope for the best, which makes no sense to me. If I’m a concert promoter, I want my tickets out wherever the fans are. So, why not have a model that moves your tickets into more platforms at once and helps you sell these events. There are so many ways in which we can improve the experience. If we could get around a table and discuss this, there are opportunities that can help both the industry as well as the fan.
There’s a perception that viagogo was an unregulated marketplace, which contradicts what you’ve laid out. Where does that discrepancy in perception come from?
We go misunderstood. I’ll take responsibility for some of that, for not doing a better job of educating, certainly the media, and not doing our part to explain it. I know that our customers know what it is. And I know that we’ve been operating in the United Kingdom since 2006, and that we’ve grown every single year, pandemic aside. That says a lot.
In the United Kingdom, we’ve been regulated for many, many years, following lots of government discussions and engagement. We’re on very good terms with the CMA [Competition and Markets Authority], and we’ve been compliant with the local obligations, and go above and beyond that.
The misperception has really been created out of competition concerns, in my opinion. I think a lot of the friction is about competition. It’s not really about the fans, it’s about, ‘hey, how do I get control over the ticket? How do I maximize my value?’ What we’re missing here is that it’s really about making sure that the fan gets the best experience. To do that, we need to unlock all of this restriction, we need to make things a lot more fluid, and a lot more free, and make it accessible and easy.
Can you address spec selling and how much of an issue that is?
It’s against our terms and conditions. Anytime we get notified about it, we immediately go to the sellers asking for proof of purchase. If they can’t provide it, we take their listings down. We have ways for event organizers, and authorities to contact us on our website directly. They can use that when there are issues or concerns, and they have. We have a 50 million tickets on our website at any time all over the world, we’re an open marketplace. Do things slip through the cracks from time to time? Sure. But we have mechanisms in place to resolve this.
But, again, if we’re looking for a solution for that, it’s really about working together. We want to sell the tickets that have not sold at the box office, we’d like to help with that. We would like to sell out events. We do not want to prioritize a ticket from a seller that doesn’t have the same relationship with the box office. We would prefer to help sell the box office tickets. And if there is a resale market thereafter, fine.
Comparing ticketing in the U.S. and the UK is like comparing apples and oranges. Are there still best practices from one market that could work in the other?
The allocation model is better than what we see in the United States, where we basically have one ticketing provider. It’s like a monopoly. There is more flexibility in the UK or across Europe, but it needs to be improved. How can we all work together to try to support the event and sell it out? How do you get to a place where all these ticketing companies that are reputable, that have good marketing, good products, can work together. Like the travel industry, which is a really good analogy.
If I buy an airline ticket, I can go to 100 different places, and I know that airline ticket’s legit. Why doesn’t music look the same way? Why doesn’t sport look the same way? It’s because of what’s happened over the years, which we don’t need to go into today. But from our standpoint, the allocation model today is really manual, it’s spreadsheets, it’s hard. But if we can find ways to all collaborate, and there’s technical solutions for us to integrate with each other, for us to see what’s available, to validate tickets if we need to, in short: doing everything we can to get to get the event organizer’s tickets in front of as many fans as we can – that improves the whole experience.
In an interview with StubHub a few years back, it was raised that certain tickets had simply become luxury items. Is there a danger of this industry becoming a two-tier, two-class industry, where a certain type of show is only accessible to the rich?
In order to be more effective at distributing these tickets to certain fans, depending on their backgrounds or their ability to get to the event, things like that, we’ve got to be a lot more sophisticated technologically. I can give you an example. We have a very good relationship with Wimbledon here in the United Kingdom. Wimbledon’s got debenture seats, which are £100,000. They actively allow those to be resold, but they also have ballots, and the ballots are kept artificially low, and non-transferable for a reason: they want to make sure that people can get into the event. We do not allow ballots to be resold, we just allow debentures to be resold. It’s one way of collaborating. There are others to ensure that we can maintain good market dynamics, and satisfy fans with tons of discretionary income, as well as those with very little discretionary income.
There’s a lot of different kinds of fans out there. How do we get to a model where we can get tickets into the hands of fans for whom it is financially hard to make it to these events? There’s ways to do that. Look at the college system in the United States for sports: There are donors, and there are donor tickets. They get very good seats, and they get a lot of great perks, and they fund all the students’ tickets. The football model here in the United Kingdom: they’ve got the VIP seats, and it funds a lot of the fans’ tickets. There are ways, but we have to collaborate together.
As someone, who’s been going to gigs my whole life, I understand how important it is to build fans up over the years. So, no, we don’t want to price people out, that’s dumb. What you want to do is try to build up your fan base over time, but it’s not all or nothing. You can’t say, ‘everything’s transfer-less, stop!’
Pearl Jam is a great example: Most of their fans are my age and above, have a bit of money, they don’t want to hit an on sale nine months in advance, and they don’t want to be told that they can’t access the resale market, because everything’s transfer-less. Let’s get around the table, how can we use StubHub and viagogo to help with distribution? What can we do to make sure we’re getting tickets into the hands of fans that may not have the ability to get them? How can we satisfy the higher-end market? We want to build technology and products to help support that. With one provider doing all this, there’s no innovation.