WANTED! FA cup semi final tickets

Out of curiousity I found this.......

Sunday March 27, 2005
The Observer

This time next week hundreds of thousands of music fans will be glued to their phones or computer screens - or both - credit card in one hand and a strong coffee in the other, praying they will strike it lucky in the annual Glastonbury Festival ticket lottery.
Things have come a long way from the first bash 35 years ago, where the ticket bore the legend: '£1, at Worthy Farm, includes a jug of milk from Michael Eavis.' Three years ago organisers erected a 'ring of steel', a 12ft-high security fence to keep out gate-crashers and undesirables, and this year they've gone where even authoritarian home secretaries have yet to go and introduced photo ID cards.

Gatecrashers have largely given up on Glastonbury, but the ticket tout has proved a more stubborn problem. The creeping middle-class colonisation of the event has made tickets more desirable, and big bucks can be earned. Michael Eavis, the dairy farmer who runs the show, hopes he has the touts beaten this year.

'If you can't get tickets this year, you can't get in,' he says. 'If 2 million people try to get tickets, there are still only 120,000 tickets. You can't get a quart into a pint bottle.'

If Glastonbury does eliminate profiteering middlemen from the music calendar's biggest event, the industry will sit up and take notice. Being ripped off has become an unavoidable part of the gig-goers' experience. After all, this is an industry where fans don't blink an eye at forking out £50 (face value) to watch Neil Young peform on stage at the Hammersmith Apollo accompanied only by a battered acoustic guitar. In January this year the Office of Fair Trading called for a shake-up in the way concert tickets are sold.

Ticket pricing is often as clear as Glastonbury mud. The OFT found that even legitimate agents were charging as much as two-thirds on top of the face value of a ticket. A fan buying a £10 ticket for indie band Hope of the States' gig at the Camden Electric Ballroom last July would have shelled out an extra £6.70 if they bought from See Tickets. The OFT has recommended that the Committee for Advertising Practice amend its own guidelines so that all press ads for concert tickets include full pricing details.

But that's only the start. Secondary agents such as getmetickets.net and frontrowtickets.com specialise in acquiring those 'hard to get' tickets and charging huge mark-ups in the process. Just before Christmas, Getmetickets.net was offering Glastonbury tickets for £237 at an 'early bird discount'. The fact that the tickets didn't exist and the festival wasn't even confirmed wasn't a problem. The same outfit sold 500 tickets for last year's festival for as much as £477. But these agents have effectively been wrong-footed by Glastonbury's ID card ruse.

Those prices are a snip, however compared with the forthcoming Cream reunion gig at the Royal Albert Hall. The tickets, which have a face value of £50, £75 and £125, are being sold for up to £1,800. If you are going looking forward to seeing the first concert by Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce in 36 years, don't be surprised to find yourself sitting behind a row of bankers from New York. 'It's predominantly Americans who fly over especially for the gig,' reckons Andrew Brown of Getmetickets. Even an exchange rate of nearly $2 to the pound has not deterred rich American rockers. 'It's money for old rope,' Brown adds.

Then there is the 'Ebay effect' - where thousands of tickets are resold on auction websites. A new generation of e-touts has meant that many in the industry have began to regard their old adversary, the dodgy geezer who hangs around outside gigs going 'Got any spares, mate? Buy or sell' in a loud cockney accent with something approaching fondness. The Ebay entrepreneurs were out in force for February's Comic Aid benefit at the Hammersmith Apollo, starring Eddie Izzard, Dawn French and Jonathan Ross among others. Tickets, priced at £50, were going for £189 on the site.

'It leaves a really bad taste in the mouth when you have someone flogging a ticket for a charity show. How they can live with themselves is beyond me,' comments Addison Creswell, who manages Lee Evans and Jack Dee and was one of the 'Comedy Mafia' who promoted the gig. 'I used to moan about the old touts; I don't moan so much about them anymore. It was ironic because they all seemed to stay away from Hammersmith for Comic Aid out of respect. Meanwhile Middle England is busy flogging their tickets on Ebay.'

Geoff Ellis, chief executive of DF Concerts, promotes Scotland's biggest festival, T in the Park, at Balado near Kinross, at the beginning of July. 'What we need is a change in the law covering the resale of tickets,' Ellis argues. 'If you buy a ticket for a football match, it's illegal to resell it because of crowd segregation problems, and in the same way the government needs to address the resale of live music tickets.'

The 130,000 tickets for the festival (which has Green Day, Foo Fighters and James Brown on the bill) sold out in just four days, and hours later hundreds of those tickets resurfaced on the internet for three times their original value. Ellis has yet to print the tickets, and those purporting to buy and sell his tickets online are, as he puts it, 'dealing in futures'. He plans to send out tickets late as possible in an attempt to frustrate touts.

Not only are fans being forced to pay over the odds, they are also increasingly buying bogus tickets. At last year's T in the Park, 200 people 'bought' from an online seller. 'Where there is demand, there'll always be touts - it's like prostitution or selling dodgy car stereos,' says Ellis. 'But if everyone can sell tickets online, there's going to be no point standing outside venues.'

Don't be fooled into thinking the online black market is all about ordinary gig-goers selling because they are otherwise engaged on the night of the concert. It is big business. Don Foster, the Liberal Democrat Culture and Sport spokesman, is running a 'toutwatch' campaign to tackle those who profiteer at the expense of genuine music fans. According to Foster, months before Madonna's autumn tour last year there were some 482 listings on Ebay for Madonna tickets, with one pair selling for £1,170. This meant touts could be earning almost £1 million for flogging tickets in one day. 'Organised ticket touting is blighting the enjoyment of the real fans and the government is doing nothing,' he says.

A spokeswoman for Ebay points out: 'The resale of concert tickets is not illegal and is therefore permitted on Ebay. We view the selling of tickets as a private matter between the event organiser and the seller. Ebay is not a party to the contracts between the organisers and the ticket-holders.'

Secondary agents must comply with the Price Indications (Resale of Tickets) Regulations 1994, which require the face value of a resold ticket to be made clear to the consumer at the point of sale, including seat locations.

'When I last looked on Ebay there were an awful lot of tickets on sale which weren't offering that information,' says Jonathan Brown, secretary of industry body the Society Of Ticket Agents And Retailers. 'This is clearly in breach of the regulations. The question that needs to be addressed is whose responsibility is it to police that [they have been breached] - Ebay's or the customer's?'

Brown would like to see it made illegal to resell tickets at a specified threshold level above their face value. He would also like to see prose cutions brought against people using sites that rip fans off.

So great was the demand for Glastonbury tickets last year that many fans spent the best part of 24 hours trying to access an inaccessible website and ringing a number that was constantly engaged. The website received 2 million hits and crashed. Eavis promises twice the number of telephone operators to take calls this year, and claims there is a 'tested and retested improved online system' so people should not be left in limbo.

No doubt many Glastonbury veterans will deplore photo ID cards as a sign of how just how mainstream this former bastion of counter-culture has become. Steve Jenner, who runs the Virtual Festivals website, is having none of it: 'It's much better now that you don't have to watch your back all the time or worry that someone might slash your tent in the middle of the night. This is the price you pay.' He points out there is little fans can do to increase the odds of getting tickets next weekend but, he adds, priority is given to anyone calling from a public phone and those in the military.

If you still can't get a ticket complete with photo ID through legit means, no doubt there will be a tout out there with his 'spare'.

And if you're really desperate, there's always plastic surgery

I also liked this quote from - http://newswww.bbc.net.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/4309637.stm

"People who buy tickets and then sell them are simply capitalising on the laziness of people who didn't buy a ticket in the first place."

So true!

Also found -

http://www.oft.gov.uk/News/Press+releases/2005/12-05.htm

http://networks.silicon.com/webwatch/0,39024667,39125758,00.htm