The fight against industrial-scale online ticket touting has united members of the music community and given new hope for an industry without touts.

“Its organised crime and it doesn’t contribute anything to music,” said Jon Tolley owner of Banquet Records and promoter of some of Londons greatest live shows. Sitting in his office at the bustling independent record store that has become notorious for attracting some of the hugest acts to small venues. “It doesn’t give anything back and we try to do everything we can to stop it from happening,” he continues.

The crime in question is the mass reselling of tickets via secondary ticketing websites by touts. It is estimated that the market is worth a massive £1 billion a year. That money is going outside of the music industry and not to the artists that produce the music, or the promoters that put on the gigs. This week a committee of MP’s told consumers to boycott the secondary ticketing website Viagogo, slammed Google for promoting them and asked for a review of laws against ticket touts.

This is a welcome move for campaigners like FanFair Alliance who have been fighting this cause for 3 years. Since their inception in 2016, they have seen many changes. “Back in 2015, there were some quite light touch regulations and laws passed. The consumer rights act was meant to regulate secondary ticketing or reselling tickets,” said Adam Webb the Fan Fair Alliance campaign manager. “When our campaign started none of that was being enforced,” he complained.

The alliance subsequently prompted and encouraged the competition and markets authority, who are the regulators of business, to take action and investigate the market. As a result of that Ticketmaster decided to move out of the market, closing down both of their secondary ticketing websites. This just leaves two major websites StubHub owned by eBay and Viagogo owned by a collection of private investors.

FanFair brought together the music community to take a stand against profiteering in the secondary ticketing market and so far it has been working. They reach for their aimsby promoting pro-consumer legislation, technology and practices. “The campaign really has been to try and reform the secondary ticketing market,” Webb reiterates, “Not to stop the resale of tickets but to try and make it more consumer friendly. An ideal market is your selling the ticket at a price you brought it for so someone else can buy the ticket for the same price,” he continues.

Webb wants to make it clear that he totally agrees with ticket resale as sometimes fans need a safe space where they can sell on tickets to events they can no longer attend. “You’ve got this whole wave now in the UK of consumer-friendly resale sites. Every primary ticket sellers are now offering resale, if you buy a ticket off one of these agents you can resale the ticket now at face value,” he explains, adding “You’ve also got companies like Twickets now, who are partnered with a lot of artists.”

Twickets is a website where fans can sell on genuine tickets at face value or less, it doesn’t charge seller fees either. It may be supported by over 200 artists from MUSE to Queen, but it had humble beginnings. Founder, Richard Davies, was looking for tickets to a show he wanted to attend on Twitter and realised there were a lot of people wanting to buy and sell tickets at face value. Shortly after, Twickets started as a Twitter account connecting buyers and sellers and later evolved into a proper marketplace.

Despite not having the advertising budgets of the two big ticket reseller websites Twickets feel they can easily compete, and how? “By being the only ethical, face value resale marketplace available,” said Roberto Bua music partnership manager of Twickets. “Twickets was built by fans, for fans. We want to make sure those fans who can’t attend an event can get their money back in a safe and secure way, while also ensuring other fans can attend in their place,” he explained.

New technology is a big part of the fight against ticket touts’ new websites like Twickets are for Webb the way forward and the old websites are practically dinosaurs in the digital world. “I think that these companies like StubHub and Viagogo were all founded ten years ago or longer and are legacy businesses,” he said, “I think that their business model which is based upon ticket touts and exploitation is under pressure and probably on the way out. What we are now moving towards is a proper resale market where it will be easier to resell a ticket and there will be a lot less rip-offs”

Some events are bound to attract touts and for Banquet Records they are are the ones where the bands are too big to be playing a venue that size. Including recent show for the huge star Billie Eilish or upcoming show for Foals at Kingston’s PRYZM. Tolley emphasises that “It’s not only because we feel it is wrong but also management and other people are getting in touch to say ‘we need to stop these getting into the hands of touts’. We try to do everything we can because artists are often playing for cheaper than they would play normally. We’re not making a load of money on this and it is not really in the spirit of how the gigs been booked.”

Whilst the government are encouraging people to boycott Viagogo the website is still in operation and the touts are still making money. This means it is left up to promoters like Tolley to take precautions. One popular way of preventing tickets from ending up in the hands of touts is by using a lead booker system. Where the name of the person who booked the tickets is printed on them and door staff check photo ID to make sure they are the correct person going into the venue.

Despite the lead booker system being a great way to control who can use a ticket, named tickets are still being sold on Viagogo. The result of this is people turning up to shows with tickets that are invalid and being turned away. Famously hundreds of fans who bought tickets through Viagogo were turned away from Ed Sheran’s concert in May 2018. Thousands more fans found their tickets cancelled at the gate and were forced to buy new tickets. It was reported that 10,000 tickets from the tour were cancelled.

Needless to say, Viagogo does not agree with people who buy tickets on their platform being turned away. In an FAQ distributed by their press team, they state: “The tickets sold on Viagogo’s platform are genuine tickets that have been sold on by the original ticket purchaser in good faith. Event organisers sometimes make claims that they will deny entry to people who have purchased resold tickets. These types of entry restrictions are highly unfair and in our view, unenforceable and illegal.”

Even smaller promoters like Tolley are sometimes forced to cancel tickets, which in itself can cause problems. “The problem is if for whatever reason resold tickets have got past us and you’ve got a kid who’s turned up to a show whose spent like £90 for a £15 ticket what do you do then?” he asks before going on to explain “In theory, that ticket is not valid. We shouldn’t really let that customer in but it is not them that’s the problem. They’re not thinking ‘how can I ruin the system?’, they’re just trying to watch a band they like.”

Understanding where Tolley is coming from is easy, fans just want to see their idols and they’ll pay to do it. Some of them will pay more than others and on the surface, it can seem like a pretty victimless crime. However, the reality of the situation is these touts are taking substantial volumes of tickets out of circulation and reselling them back to fans at inflated prices. What you’ve got are audiences being exploited, people being ripped off and the amounts that some of the tickets go for on Viagogo certainly are criminal.