Earlier this week, the UK Culture, Media and Sport Committee held an evidence session on secondary ticketing, which turned in to a bit of a grilling for Ticketmaster and StubHub’s representatives.
That tone has continued in the Committee’s report after the event, which claims that the session “has shed a light on much more far-ranging and disturbing factors in the market, including clear indications of too close relationships between those selling tickets on the primary market and sellers on the secondary market”.
The wording of the report is blunt, to say the least.
“Witnesses’ failure to give satisfactory answers to the Committee’s questions about where companies’ main profits are made, the possibility of even Chinese walls between parts of the same company, and the willingness of the ticket selling companies to even try to identify, let alone bar, large-scale ticket touts and fraudulent sellers have led us to conclude that a fuller investigation of the whole area of ticketing is needed.”
The next step is a roundtable at the end of this month, to be held by the UK Secretary of State.
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