I know this topic has been done before

Just found this on internet by accident, copy and pasting from The Scotsman 4th February 2006

MUSIC fans are being forced to pay astronomical prices for tickets to pop concerts because of a new scam involving eBay, the internet marketplace.

The Scotsman has discovered that tickets for gigs by well-known artists frequently sell out almost as soon as they are placed for sale online - and then appear within minutes for auction on eBay, sometimes for more than ten times the face value.

It is understood that e-ticket touts have discovered a way of circumventing strict limitations on the number of tickets pop fans can buy online, which can be as few as four per person.

The practice was condemned yesterday by concert promoters and music fans who demanded that internet touting be outlawed in line with the ban in place for major sporting events such as football matches.

Last week, tickets for a gig at the Glasgow ABC by Dirty Pretty Things on 5 March - in high demand because it is the first visit to Scotland by the new outfit of the former Libertines co-frontman Carl Barat - sold out within three minutes of going on sale.

Shortly afterwards a number of eBay users were offering pairs of tickets for sale, with the auction price in some cases going over £100 for a pair, before PCL Concerts, the promoters, managed to stop the sale of 98 tickets, which had a face value of just £8.50 each.

There is a litany of examples of similar situations. Tickets for Morrissey's "sold out" Glasgow Carling Academy show are up for auction on eBay, with a single ticket available as a "buy it now" item for £59.49 plus postage, though the face value is just £29. Meanwhile a pair of seats for one of Robbie Williams's Hampden Park shows this summer can be purchased on eBay for £189.99.

Some music fans in Scotland are so upset that they are setting up a petition and in the meantime urge a boycott of eBay until it addresses their concerns.

"EBay has many legal uses, for example allowing a small business to sell in a large marketplace," said Thomas Heaney, a regular concert-goer from Edinburgh. "However, widespread touting of gig tickets on eBay is robbing real music fans and charging them many times the price of a face- value ticket.

"Gigs sell out faster because these touts buy by the bucketload. They even have programs which buy all the tickets for them, without going through the forms everyone else does.

"The problem lies in the fact that, according to eBay rules, they're doing nothing wrong - supply and demand.

"But the only reason there exists an excessive demand is that these touts are sapping the supply. EBay themselves are unwilling to change these rules, as they make money from these leeches and I would urge fellow fans to boycott eBay until they do so."

Charlie Coney, an eBay spokesman, replied that eBay offers music fans a last-chance to buy tickets for shows that have sold out, adding that the blame lay in the way tickets were distributed.

"The problem lies with the primary distribution," he said. "Distributors and promoters are happier to block-sell a thousand tickets and that's clearly not an efficient or effective way of getting tickets into the music-lovers' hands.

"They allow ticket agencies to buy in volume from them and that agency will then resell through venues like eBay and others. By looking to restrict and boycott eBay you are playing into the hands of event organisers."

However, PCL promotions, along with other major Scottish promoters such as DF, reject this allegation and deny that eBay is an innocent party.

"We have had this discussion with eBay, but they just won't take any responsibility for it," said a PCL spokesman. "The problem is that the law, for some bizarre reason, prohibits touting on football events, and most sporting events, but still allows it on concerts. Touting was not a major problem when there were just a few people outside venues; then the internet and the likes of eBay came along.

"People are now just buying tickets in bulk to sell them for a profit - people do this for a living, and I would imagine it is a black-market job. It's not fair that the fans have to pay so much to get a ticket, and if people spend £100 on a ticket for an established band, they are not going to see so many other gigs and that means that young bands are finding it harder to get an audience."

PCL also pointed out that sites other than eBay pose a problem, singling out for criticism a site called getmetickets.net, billed as the UK's largest independent ticket agency.

"Getmetickets is a big problem because we don't know where they get their tickets from," the PCL spokesman added. "We don't know if the tickets they are selling are genuine. We have had people turning up to Oasis and Foo Fighters gigs with tickets they have bought from getmetickets, but we have no record of them."