Could Michael Jackson death spark secondary ticketing meltdown?
Friday, June 26th, 2009
A storm may be brewing in the secondary ticketing market, following the death of Michael Jackson last night. With 750,000 tickets sold for his planned run of gigs at London’s The O2 venue – many of which have been re-sold through the secondary market – the after-effects could shine a spotlight on secondary ticketing – and specifically how trustworthy it is, and how honest ticket resellers will prove to be.
While Michael Jackson’s official Sony-hosted site, the Seatwave and Viagogo secondary ticket sites have acknowledged the pop icon’s death, concert promoter AEG’s MichaelJacksonLive.com is still displaying the same buzz and hype as it did in the days prior to his death. At the time of writing, Ticketmaster.co.uk is still allowing fans to explore dates for Jacko’s O2 concert run as if the star wasn’t dead. Ticketmaster has now taken the O2 dates off the site.
It is expected, though not yet fully confirmed, that legitimate retailers will offer full refunds to ticket buyers, leaving promoter AEG out of pocket to the tune of tens of millions of pounds. UPDATE: Seatwave has confirmed this, according to BBC News Online. But Jackson’s concert run was arguably the biggest yet to provide official blessing to secondary ticket retail through partners such as Viagogo, with yet more tickets sold at marked-up prices through eBay.
It’s all gone a bit Pete Tong between promoter AEG Live and secondary ticketing site Viagogo. The latter had some kind of official relationship with AEG for the 50 Michael Jackson gigs at The O2 – it was linked to by the official MichaelJacksonLive website, and around 10% of the seats for each night were set aside to be sold as “official premium” tickets.
