Glastonbury organiser Emily Eavis has called on the live entertainment industry to follow its lead in a bid to “eliminate the ‘for profit’ secondary market”.
Glastonbury, the UK’s most celebrates music festival, introduced a registration system 10 years ago that assigns a photo of the purchaser to the ticket they have bought, which prevents reselling.
Eavis said that the system was set up in response to festival goers being charged huge sums by touts and others wanting to profit from sales.
Representatives from the music industry recently shared their concerns with MPs about the growth of the secondary market, and Eavis – daughter of Glastonbury founder Michael – said that the festival’s success in reducing resales could be a blueprint for other operators.
“We want to eliminate the ‘for profit’ secondary market when it comes to Glastonbury,” she told the BBC’s Newsbeat programme.
“And that’s what this does. It means people are paying the right price for the ticket. We do our best to keep the price down. The last thing we want is people spending twice the amount on a ticket that’s dodgy or unreliable.
“We’ve had years of hearing these terrible stories from people who’ve been ripped off or tickets not turning up because they’ve been bought on imaginary sites. Our system works really well.”
Demand for Glastonbury is huge each year, with the 2017 event selling out in minutes when tickets became available through See Tickets in October.
While Eavis accepts that people who miss out on tickets would love the chance to get them from a secondary site, she said that protecting the tickets outweighs the downsides.
“We would rather do this and make it safe for people to buy tickets than get involved in secondary sites,” she said.
“We’d like others in the industry to adopt similar methods. We’ve tweaked it over the years and it’s proven that it works.”
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