The Rolling Stones’ upcoming 50 & Counting shows will take place at the O2 in London, the Barclays Center in Brooklyn and the Prudential Center in Newark – all owned by AEG, which has just struck a deal to make StubHub its official secondary ticketing partner. A good time, then, for Mick Jagger to be criticising the secondary ticketing market. “I don’t think there should be a secondary ticket market. I don’t think it should be legal,” he tells Billboard, in response to an interview question about high ticket prices for the shows. “To my mind, there has to be a better way of doing it, but we’re living, really, with the way the system functions. We can’t, in four shows, change the whole ticketing system… Most of the tickets go for a higher price than we’ve sold them for, so you can see the market is there. We don’t participate in the profit.” The real question is whether bands like the Stones WILL participate in the profit when the owner of the venues they play in has an official secondary partner.
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