StubHub is one of the platforms that takes flak in the debate over secondary ticketing. The company’s general manager of music and theatre for North America, Jeff Poirier, has been defending its position – and claiming that it is working with artists behind the scenes more than people realise.
“So in short, there’s a lot of partnerships that we have that are not made known to the public,” he told Billboard. “Clearly artists, rightfully so, have a brand to protect and they should be careful about that brand… Some are more progressive than others in terms of artists, but there’s also some that want to dip their toes in, and have been working with us over time to use us as a distribution channel. They should just view us as another distribution channel, and that’s what we’re trying to educate them on, on the benefit of that.”
Poirier is put on the spot about why StubHub won’t always remove tickets for an event if the artist asks for it – he says that charitable and not-for-profit events, as well as white-supremacist bands, are examples of events that would be removed. Bruce Springsteen? Less so.
“What it comes down to is we’re providing a marketplace. We believe in transparency and supply and demand dictating what it sells for. One of the things to think about is if we don’t have that up, and there is nobody else around to re-sell as a platform online, it’s just going to go out to the street. It will because that’s how it used to be, if you’re mispricing an asset…”
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