Scot Tobias, a key member of Fair Ticketing Alliance, has spoken out in defence of resale stating “the public loves the secondary market.”
Tobias, who is also the founder and president of Worldwide Tickets, told Billboard why he thinks the often controversial resale industry is integral to a thriving live music business.
He told Billboard that they formed Fair Ticketing Alliance in an effort to “establish fair practice and clarify what the laws really are.” Tobias noted that there is a lot of uncertainty surrounding the legal aspect of the secondary market.
“There’s a lot of speculation as to what is legal and what isn’t legal. We’ve made a submission to the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee inquiry into live music and we have got positive feedback from a lot of people,” Tobias said, according to Billboard.
“I went through this same process in the U.S. and once people heard both sides of the story we were able to establish a level playing field. The explosion of the secondary market in the last two years has caused a lot of this backlash and kneejerk reaction [in Europe].
“But the bottom line is that the public enjoys and loves the secondary market. They love the convenience. They love the availability. They love the true valuation of the tickets. And as brokers, we want to participate in the markets fairly.”
The ticketing veteran said that an open market is healthy and that people should be celebrating the success of the industry that has taken off in the US, but said that people in the UK are looking at it as a “catastrophe.”
“There is a sector of [fans in] the market that don’t get the opportunity to buy the tickets right away, but do like the luxury of being able to buy them later at a premium, or else they wouldn’t do it,” Tobias said.
“People wouldn’t buy these tickets at a premium unless they wanted to. We have had problems in the US with deceptive websites and deceptive marketing practices, which I’m very much against. That needs to be addressed, but you still have to allow people to be able to buy and sell tickets as long as they are doing it fairly.”
Image: Moses
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