THIS MORNING, THOUSANDS of fans of Kendrick Lamar logged onto their laptops, queued at ticket booths and had visa cards at the ready to buy tickets to the rap artist’s Dublin gig.
At 9am this morning, tickets went on sale for Lamar’s The Damn Tour which comes to Dublin’s 3Arena this February.
Tickets ranged in price from €60 to €100 for the Grammy award-winning singer, but many didn’t get their hands on one in time.
Notwithstanding the fans that missed out on Kendrick tickets who blamed those who bought tickets but “who only know know song”, the thing that really irked people was when tickets reappeared elsewhere.
Almost immediately after tickets were sold out on Ticketmaster, over a hundred tickets went up on its sister site Seatwave for double, or even triple the original price.
Seatwave bills itself as a Ticketmaster company which allows fans who missed out on sold-out gigs to purchase official tickets. It allows fans to sell their tickets, even within minutes of purchase.
The company charges a 10% “success fee” on sales and allows customers set their own selling price. That means that the higher the price for “secondary market” tickets, the more money Seatwave stands to make.
For the Kendrick Lamar concert, Ticketmaster sold tiered tickets for €60 and standing tickets for €80 – minutes later, the same tickets went up for sale on Seatwave for €150 and €175. That’s over double the original price.
“I can understand how people are frustrated,” Fine Gael TD for Dublin North West, Noel Rock said.
He said that the legislation that’s been introduced to tackle this kind of ticket reselling, or ticket touting, “hasn’t been moving as quickly as he’d like” and that there needs to be faster action on this as more and more events, including sporting events, are being affected.
“It’s very clear that it’s getting worse every year. It used to be two or three were selling out and you saw this kind of price gauging on the secondary market, but now it’s routine,” he said.
The extent of the problem is so great that artists like Ed Sheeran and Taylor Swift took action to make sure tickets to their gigs weren’t being bought for individuals to make a profit.
In July, Sheeran announced that he would recall 10,000 tickets that were up for sale on an unofficial ticketing site for inflated prices, and put them back up for sale on his own website for the original sale price.
But Rock says that the ball is really in the “primary seller’s court”, saying that most artists don’t have the power to dictate how tickets are sold.
“Ed Sheeran had a level of leverage that most other artists don’t have, most other artists won’t sell upwards of 200,000 tickets, In the case of someone like Kendrick Lamar he doesn’t have the power to call the shots. the smaller the artist is, the less clout they have to specify anti-touting measures to the promoter and then to the ticket seller.”
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