Two of my “Crew” have bailed out of the THE The gig on 6th June at Brixton Academy.
I have put them on the Getmein reseller site that is associated with he ticket seller but also wanted to see if any of the massive are interested.
The original costs are as follows:-
Type: Full Price Ticket
Details: Price Level 1, Stalls Standing, Incl. 1.25 Levy
Ticket Price: £45.00 x 2 = £90.00
Service Charge: £5.65 x 2 = £11.30
Facility Charge: £1.25 x 2 = £2.50
Delivery Charge: £2.75
Total Charge: £106.55
If anyone is interested in the pair from here they are at the £45.00 per ticket price only*
Please PM me and we can make contact and meet up before the gig.
* Sorry for sounding like a massive t̶w̶a̶t̶ ticket tout but needs must and all that
Cheers,
Razor
a kind offer I can sadly not take up.
But this brings home the vile markups for gig tickets. Service Charge: £5.65 x 2 = £11.30
Facility Charge: £1.25 x 2 = £2.50
Delivery Charge: £2.75.
That’s £16.55 for the clerk to issue the ticket and send you a PDF to print out or show on the phone. Or registered delivery of the output above.
I used to bunk off school to queue up (in blazer with mates alongside the hairies in greatcoats and army surplus) to get concert tickets at the Brighton Dome box office when Camel, Rory Gallagher, or Lol Creme-era 10cc were playing: it cost £2 with no surcharge. Going back to school, we were picked off for detention like penguins being got by sharks in the south Atlantic.
The economics of the modern ticket surcharge seem terribly suspect to me.
Can a business/ economically minded AWer explain if there is any honest rationale here, or if it is all extortion by The Man? Add the unspeakable venue parking fees and crap corporate catering, etc. and it becomes a profoundly unpleasant experience.
Apparently these days the artist is getting a cut from all these charges. I recently bought a ticket for Fleetwood Mac. The cheapest “$69” seats actually cost $96!
A: “Extortion by The Man”
It’s the Ryanair model of advertising “cheap” prices, then rinsing you for essentially unavoidable “extras.” I once got someone at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire box office to admit that there was literally no way of buying a ticket at actual face value – even paying & collecting in cash, in person involved an additional “administration” charge, albeit a small one (a few quid.)
And yes, the artists will almost certainly be getting their wedge of these extra charges – one of the other dodges is for the artist/promoter to put them on resale sites themselves to get the benefit of the higher prices… it is absolutely a racket, but until the public starts voting with its collective wallet, there’s no incentive for it to improve…
(PS Razor Boy, would have loved to have taken these tickets off your hands, but am out of town that night – gutted!)
I don’t like being mugged by anyone. But it does seem some venues / sellers are worse than others. Pretty sure the Jeff beck and Nick mason tix I got recently for Nottingham were face value plus a £2 ‘admin’ charge for using their electronic booking system (I pick up at the venue: TAKE THAT KAPITILIZT PIGZ!).
Venues are generally at face value (or close to it), it is official sellers like Ticketmaster that take the piss, still better than using stubhub or getmein unless they aren’t selling and drop below face.
Different booking organisations charge in different ways.
I always either go for self-print or collect-at-venue tickets.
A recent Zoe Rahman solo piano concert at The Maltings in St. Albans was via Ticket Source and there were no extra charges.
All gigs at Chandos Arms Jazz in Colindale are processed via Eventbrite and there are never any extra charges, but other Eventbrite gigs do incur charges, I think. Maybe some event organisers pay the agents a fee instead.
An upcoming concert by The Carla Bley Trio at Union Chapel in July is dealt with by Union Chapel themselves with no fees, but this Sunday’s concert there by Eliza Carthy & The Gift Band is handled by See Tickets and they charge a small handling fee.
Gigs at the Half Moon in Putney are handled by Music Glue and they charge a small variable handling fee according to the initial ticket price.
TicketMaster are well-known extortionists.
As far as I remember, tickets for concerts for Kings Place incur no fees if you collect from the desk on arrival.
A moderate fee is acceptable, in my view, as these ticketing organisations are businesses offering a service after all and save a lot of work and expense that smaller venues would otherwise have to do themselves and pass the cost on to us punters.
A £1.50 fee on top of a £10 ticket, £2.75 on top of £25 is not too onerous in my opinion.
I seem to recall the whole business of event ticketing and related fees is currently being investigated by the Government, with legislation a distinct possibility to curb the worst excesses and compel the complete cost of tickets to be made clear upfront before ordering.
I believe Eventbrite do not charge charities a fee. If Chandos Arms Jazz hit a certain yearly turnover, they will have either registered as a charity or face a tax demand. Gigs I am involved in are infrequent and never quite hit the required annual turnover, thankfully, although keeping the Eventbrite fees would be nice.
I wouldn’t have thought Just East Of Jazz, who run Chandos Arms Jazz, are a charity. They are a partnership of musicians who promote themselves and various guest artists at the venue.
They rarely sell out on advance tickets. Mostly, as a regular event that attracts customers who often buy food, they rely on a share of what the brewery give the pub as an entertainment budget.
Others who share the budget pot are not so fortunate. The weekly folk club are no longer going to be funded, because they don’t attract enough drinkers.
Advance tickets save them having to rattle their tin quite so hard on the night.
@Mike_H You don’t have to be a charity to be a registered charity (in the legal sense). If you are (for example) a community group with an income, above a certain turnover threshold, you have to either pay tax as a small business or become a registered charity. This doesn’t stop you paying expenses, but you can’t pay yourself wages.
To become a registered charity you simply download a template from the charity commission website, fill it in with your mission statement, say what you will do with the money if you disband (usually donate it to another charity), and submit it.
The group I am involved with did all the paperwork, but our gigs are irregular (and make so little profit) that we’ve never quite hit the annual turnover limit. We do, however, have a charity bank account.
They describe themselves thus, on their home page:
“Just East of Jazz is the record label and management partnership for the band Just East, the band that used to be called Just East of Jazz. Glad we got that cleared up.
We also promote monthly gigs featuring Just East plus guests at the Chandos Arms in North London.
We specialise in programming jazz events and we can also put together a really special band for concerts, gigs and parties.
There are two partners: Jeremy Shoham and Rick Finlay.”
Could be registered as a small business or charity.
It is possible (for example) part-time musicians to not have to submit a tax return if income is below a certain threshold. Usually by prior arrangement with the tax office after inspection of a couple of years worth of accounts, and it is then your responsibility to inform them if you go above (lest they find out later and track you down).
As a promoter, it is quite easy to spend most/all income from tickets on expenses (venue/PA hire, licenses, performers pay, etc) – and often spend a little more than ticketed income.
I am no legal expert and this exhausts my knowledge on the subject.
Can we expect a review from you ? Saw TT back in the 90s, and it was a hoot.
I saw The The with Johnny Marr at Reading festival in the early 90s. They were great. What I remember most was Matt’s introduction to Love is Stronger Than Death, which was a dedication to his recently deceased mother. Unfortunately his radio mic was tuned to the ground to air channel, so what we heard out front was “Roger, Wilco. Concord cleared for landing Heathrow runway one. Over”.
Those clever IT folk are proposing a way to remove second-market reselling in a way that is supposedly impossible to circumvent, using a bitcoin-style “blockchain” protocol to add an unfakeable proof of provenance to your ticket.
https://aventus.io/
Looks clever – so clever I need to read it again.
Could be a solution if it works
Iron Maiden did investigate the idea of Bio-metric ticketing.
Never did find out how it went, or even if it worked