Half of UK music fans are spending more than £20 each month on tickets for concerts and festivals, according to a new census.
A mere 0.4 per cent of the 4,400 respondents said that they bought a ticket to a music event for the purpose of reselling it at a profit in the last 12 months.
Researchers from the Universities of Edinburgh, Newcastle and Turku in Finland carried out the census in March last year. Surveys were conducted in Brighton, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, Newcastle-Gateshead, Oxford, and Southampton.
“This survey is the largest of its kind in the UK,” Matt Brennan, from the University Of Edinburgh’s Reid School Of Music, said, according to Music Week. “We hope it can influence the valuable contribution live music makes to wider society and help support the protection of the live music ecology.”
The UK Live Music Census found that 44 per cent of respondents to the audience online survey had to resell a ticket for a live music event in the past 12 months, i.e. purchased a ticket and then found they could not attend.
Of those, 41 per cent resold the ticket at face value and only two per cent resold it for profit.
“While it is undeniable that demand exists for customers to be able to return unwanted tickets, the question then becomes: who is reselling the ticket and for what purpose? The census showed that it was an on-going concern for significant numbers of respondents to the audience survey and that very few bought with the specific aim of selling on,” the report states.
“With this in mind, we recommend that the UK government continues to investigate secondary ticketing via the Competition And Markets Authority and that the Digital, Culture, Media And Sport Committee continue its investigations in this area.”
Yesterday (Thursday), the UK government announced changes to the guidance provided to ticketing businesses to ensure consumers are presented with more transparency when purchasing secondary tickets.
The updated legislation for the Consumer Rights Act 2015 includes ticket resellers being required to provide customers with the location of seats, disclosure of any restrictions and the original face value.
Image: Picjumbo.com
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