Monday, March 30, 2009

NME sticks up for the fans

There's a nice piece on NME.com by Mark Beaumont attacking those big online sales of gig tickets and the effect they have on 'real' fans' chances of getting hold of a chance to see their heroes:

I heard the promoter of the gigs claiming that, of the 2 million pre-sales registrations [for Jackson tickets] logged that week, 1 million had been from touting companies’ ‘bots’; it’s these programs designed to snap up the big show tickets the instant they go on sale that crash the websites and keep you bashing away at the ‘refresh’ button like the proverbial wanking gibbon. And keep desperate fans risking an early death from hypothermia to get a whiff of a face-value ticket.

A few years ago the average tout on the Clapham Omnibus was bemoaning the threat to their ‘layvleyood’ from honest punters selling their spares on eBay. Now they’ve net-savvy’d up and, as the Jacko fiasco illustrated, they’ve got a technological stranglehold on the arena ticket industry.

It's a heartfelt, and genuine, plea for people-who-actually-want-to-go to get a better deal from ticket sellers. And only slightly undermined by having a big advert slapped on the top right of the page:
Reading and Leeds Festivals 2009 Reading and Leeds Festivals 2009

Exclusive NME Ticket allocation on sale 7pm today


2 comments:

Anonymous said...

bit of a tenuous link though, don't you think?

Simon Hayes Budgen said...

Mark Beaumont writes piece about how selling all the tickets off online in one big lump disadvantages fans in favour of touts who have bots designed to suck up the tickets. Suggests we might be better off selling tickets face to face.

NME slaps an advert pushing its exclusive launch of tickets for Reading-Leeds online on the top of the page.

I'm not quite sure why that would be tenuous.

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