Features
TV Exposé Sparks Ticketing Battle
A Danish TV program that said prominent local promoter
The program, a TV2 consumer affairs series called “Operation X,” and at least two of the country’s biggest daily newspapers have said it’s against the law to resell tickets for more than face value in Denmark, a lead that Pollstar followed in a story in our September 17th issue.
While the law clearly says it’s illegal to resell tickets for more than face value, it does contain the caveat, “unless agreement has been made with the organizer.”
The controversy appears to hang on a disagreement over what Danes call “the law behind the law,” or how the law should be interpreted, which has heated up since it became clear Denmark’s justice department has taken the view that the law was framed to protect the artist and promoter from having their tickets touted, and not to allow the artist and promoter to tout their own tickets with impunity.
While the “Operation X” program – which aired Sept. 6 – was being researched, it obtained a note from the Department Of Justice that suggested the law was put in place to protect the act and promoter, and not to give them carte blanche to sell tickets for whatever price they choose.
When debating the law, it is highly doubtful that anyone took into account that the artists themselves might be complicit in feeding tickets to the secondary market for extra profits. It’s true the artist could very easily have raised the face value of tickets but then they might have appeared greedy to fans. In such situations, the promoter quietly does what the act requests.
“Operation X” and EkstraBkadet have asked ICO to name the acts that had their tickets voluntarily placed with Viagogo. Although he has declined to name names, ICO exec Kim Worsoe did tell EkstraBladet that his company regrets that it ever supplied tickets for Viagogo to tout on its website.
“There is no doubt that today we are sorry that we have had the cooperation. That, I will not hide,” he said. “I can’t tell you in specific, which events it is, because we have contracts with the artist. But I can say as much as it is a very, very limited amount. In total it is 450 tickets from a collective sale of 72,000 tickets.”
It appears that ICO’s actions were all legal under Danish law and that the promoter has done nothing wrong.
Like ticket resellers everywhere, Viagogo somehow finds a way to get tickets for hot shows. There are plenty of tickets for upcoming ICO-promoted shows by Justin Bieber and Leonard Cohen on Viagogo but that doesn’t mean they came from the promoter.
Both artists are represented by Rob Hallett of AEG Live . Hallett told Pollstar that the resale of these tickets was “not authorised” and he would “get them canceled.”
The tickets were likely placed on Viagogo by what “Operation X” called “super sellers,” or people with a deck of credit cards and various identities.
The only example “Operation X” found of ICO selling tickets through Viagogo without the act’s agreement was for the Copenhagen Live festival it promoted in 2010. But those sales were legal because the show wasn’t doing well and tickets on Viagogo were selling for less than face value.
Reporters interviewed Scumeck Sabbottka, tour promoter for festival headline act Rammstein and an outspoken critic of any form of touting, who said that he would never have approved of the act’s tickets being touted for higher prices on the secondary market.
In 2010 Sabottka took the unprecedented step of personalising 150,000 tickets for Take That ’s German stadium shows in a bid to stamp out what he called the “mafia system” of secondary ticketing.
“In the worst case, the promoter, the band, and the ticketing system get in bed together and rip off the customer. Some of them even get paid for issuing tickets to secondary ticketing,” he said at the time.
ICO’s name came up in “Operation X” when reporters posed as new promoters to try and find out what sort of deal could be had out of Viagogo by supplying it with tickets for resale.
They were told that they could have 90 percent of the extra money and that it’s the same deal that major promoters such as ICO are on. ICO says it no longer has an arrangement with Viagogo and ceased to supply the company with tickets in April.
A couple of investigative documentaries into the country’s secondary ticketing business have caused quite a fury in Denmark. There have been newspaper stories saying fans are being cheated, while Viagogo has accused the “Operation X” program makers of giving a false impression of how the company operates.
“We were very happy to speak to “Operation X” and it is regrettable that even after spending a morning with them at our London offices they still chose to misrepresent the facts,” Viagogo’s Ed Parkinson said in a statement Sept. 7.
“For example, suggesting that 200 people were refused entry to a Coldplay concert because tickets weren’t genuine is simply not true. Our customer services team were contacted by four people who were unable to gain entry to that event and they were refunded immediately as part of our guarantee.
“We then contacted a large number of other Coldplay customers to see if any had experienced access problems and not one of them had been refused entry. Our guarantee has significantly reduced the number of fraudulent tickets being resold and we remain absolutely committed to providing fans with a safe and secure marketplace in which to buy and sell tickets, while providing a high level of customer service to help them do so.”
The investigative program showed Parkinson promising refunds to anyone who had lost out by dealing with Viagogo, while it displayed his email address on screen for two minutes. He told “Operation X” that he doesn’t believe his company is breaking Danish law.
On Aug. 14 another Danish TV investigation called “Kontant” (or “Cash”), which was screened by DR1, showed that Viagogo’s employees buy huge numbers of tickets at the normal price, usually from authorised sellers such as Billetnet or Billetlugen, then sell them to consumers at two or three times the face value.