Ticket touting (Global)
| Ticket touting 🌍 | ||
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| Location: Global | ||
| Definition: Re-sale of tickets at inflated prices | ||
| Keywords: Global – Cyberinformality – Access – Shortage – Brokerage – Bots – Entertainment – Trade | ||
| Clusters: Market – Intermediation | ||
| Author: Patricia Donovan | ||
| Affiliation: Alumna, School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, UK | ||
By Patricia Donovan, Alumna, School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, UK
| Ticket touting, also known as ticket scalping, ticket resale or secondary ticketing, is a global practice that consists of purchasing tickets from legitimate outlets – particularly where demand is foreseen to outstrip supply – and then re-selling them at inflated prices. While ticket touting is often associated with the events industry – arts and entertainment– it may occur in any context involving ticketing, such as medical appointments and travel (Wenzhao 2016; Peters 2020: 481). The practice is longstanding, with historical records showing evidence of ticket touting for ship journeys in thirteenth-century France and for concert tickets in eighteenth-century London (Bird, Peters and Powell 2013: 429-30; McVeigh 2006: 19).
Ticket touting relates to an economy of shortage – often of a luxury good – and is a market practice. Generally, ticket touting operates as a form of brokerage executed by either an entrepreneur broker or a gatekeeper broker, which occurs when an insider – commonly a promoter, venue, artist, or primary ticket agent – intentionally participates in the touting process (Jancsics 2018: 207). Ticket touting may serve as an access practice when tickets are especially scarce due to desirability (in the events industry) or necessity: for example, in China, besides prevalent touting of arts and entertainment tickets, the touting of tickets for medical appointments is widespread and is facilitated via the provision of tickets by hospital staff to touts (Jourdan 2016; Wenzhao 2016). |
The practice of ticket touting includes a variety of methods of procurement and resale affecting the perceived legitimacy of the practice and its il/legality and un/ethicality (see Ledeneva 2018; Drayer and Martin 2010: 47). On the procurement side, the most unethical and widely illegal forms of acquiring tickets for touting – the use of automated bots and selling fraudulent tickets – constitute cybercrime, while the least controversial transactions are simple resales at face value, which are usually not framed as touting and are not illegal. There is a wide range of potential grey areas within ticket touting and this ambiguousness is further exacerbated by the different laws and regulations existing worldwide. France and Japan have each enacted wide-ranging anti-touting laws while, in the United Kingdom, unauthorised resale of tickets to football matches is illegal and yet no such provision exists for other types of events (Cooke 2018; Behr and Cloonan 2020: 98-9).
On the resale side, ticket touts have traditionally operated by physically standing outside venues to engage in spontaneous transactions of exchanging tickets for cash (Atkinson 2000: 157). While this form of exchange still widely occurs, many touts now operate online. Another prominent form of resale is through licensed brokerage, typically with storefronts or kiosks in metropolitan areas alongside privately-run websites, which provide a veneer of formality (Courty 2003: 88).
Technology plays a considerable role in twenty-first century ticket touting: the existence of secondary ticketing websites and other online marketplaces facilitate transactions between consumers and touts, while digitalisation enables questionable ticket harvesting methods like bots and the use of multiple identities to circumvent ticket limits (Behr and Cloonan 2020: 100). Despite measures used to prevent it, research suggests that ticketing websites experience almost twice the rate of malicious bot traffic that otherwise occurs across all industries with an online presence (Imperva 2019: 2; Duffy, Reid and Finch 2020: 184). Significantly, bots artificially inflate ticket demand by rapidly completing a high volume of transactions and purchasing tickets from primary sources before human consumers can do so, forcing them to engage with touts to acquire tickets (Imperva 2019: 7, 9; Behr and Cloonan 2020: 100). Bots may also analyse market conditions by acquiring, or ‘scraping,’ information such as current availability and demand to then inform touting strategies (Imperva 2019: 6). Legislation prohibiting the use of bots has been introduced even in places that have not otherwise implemented large-scale anti-touting measures, such as the UK and at the supranational level of the European Union (Behr and Cloonan 2020: 102; Lunny 2019).
Increasingly, primary ticket agents and suppliers appropriate some touting methods into their ostensibly legitimate business models to improve profits. Some primary ticket agents, including Ticketmaster, have integrated ticket resale directly into their primary platforms, even when such resale contravenes their own terms and conditions (Zou and Jiang 2020: 659; Behr and Cloonan 2020: 98, 101). The tactic of integration appears to benefit both suppliers and consumers, with touts the only ones disadvantaged (Zou and Jiang 2020: 673). In other cases, artists and promoters circumvent the primary consumer market to instead tout their own tickets on the secondary market (Bennett, Seamans and Zhu 2015: 1604; Behr and Cloonan 2020: 96). This method of surreptitiously gaining additional profit has been used by promoters since the 1950s and has been revealed more recently to occur at the express behest of performers themselves (Behr and Cloonan 2020: 96; The Economist, 2019). Research indicates that different acts are impacted differently by touting, with secondary ticketing websites contributing to significant decreases in face value pricing of less popular acts and significant increases for the most popular acts (Bennett, Seamans and Zhu 2015: 1611).
Ticket touting is also employed as a livelihood strategy by some individuals and small networks (Rosbrook-Thompson and Armstrong 2021: 200; Atkinson 2000: 166). Such touts may engage in related practices of small-scale entrepreneurship and petty capitalism, like the production and sale of counterfeit or unlicensed merchandise (Sugden 2007: 250-1; Bromley 1978: 1162; Peters 2020: 481). The existence of small ticket touting operations hinders accurate measurement of ticket touting’s full global and financial scale, though data from select industries and regions indicates that the practice is lucrative and widespread. For example, the size of the online secondary ticketing market for arts and entertainment alone is estimated to be worth approximately USD 15.19 billion (Lunny 2019).
Local names for ticket touting include bagarinaggio in Italy and la revente de billets in Francophone countries. In India, dalali – referring to fee-motivated brokerage practices – includes ticket touting. In Poland, ticket touts are named koniki and, in China, they are called Huangniu (黄牛) (Wenzhao 2016). In English, ticket touting is a prominent type of scalping practice – and ticket touting is referred to as ticket scalping in non-British English – with the term scalping itself initially used in the nineteenth century to refer to the resale of ‘unused portions of long-distance railway tickets’ (Courty 2003: 88). Other goods that are frequently subject to scalping include electronics such as video game consoles (Courty and Nasiry 2016: 143). Additionally, queue-standing practices, like stacze kolejkowi in Poland, may include paying someone to queue at box offices.
References
Atkinson, M. (2000). ‘Brother, can you spare a seat? Developing recipes of knowledge in the ticket scalping subculture,’ Sociology of Sport Journal, 17(2): 151-170
Behr, A. and Cloonan, M. (2020). ‘Going spare? Concert tickets, touting and cultural value,’ International Journal of Cultural Policy, 26(1): 95-108
Bennett, V. M., Seamans, R. and Zhu, F. (2015). ‘Cannibalization and option value effects of secondary markets: Evidence from the US concert industry,’ Strategic Management Journal, 36: 1599-1614
Bird J., Peters E. and Powell J. (2013). ‘Ticket-scalping on a Crusade ship, 1248,’ in Crusade and Christendom: Annotated documents in translation from Innocent III to the Fall of Acre: 1187-1291 Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 429-430.
Bromley, R. (1978). ‘Organization, regulation and exploitation in the so-called “urban informal sector”: The street traders of Cali, Colombia,’ World Development, 6(9-10): 1161-1171
Cooke, C. (2018). ‘French Constitutional Council says ticket touting ban is just fine,’ Complete Music Update, 17 December, completemusicupdate.com/article/french-constitutional-council-says-ticket-touting-ban-is-just-fine/
Courty, P. (2003). ‘Some economics of ticket resale,’ The Journal of Economic Perspectives, 17(2): 85-97
Courty, P. and Nasiry, J. (2016). ‘Product launches and buying frenzies: A dynamic perspective,’ Production and Operations Management, 25(1): 143-152
Drayer, J. and Martin, N. T. (2010). ‘Establishing legitimacy in the secondary market: A case study of an NFL market,’ Sport Management Review, 13(1): 39-49
Duffy, K., Reid, E. and Finch, J. (2020). ‘Sold out? Reconfiguring consumer demand through the secondary digital ticket market,’ Consumption Markets & Culture, 23(2): 174-194
The Economist (2019). ‘Touting for business: How big stars maximise their take,’ 27 July, The Economist, www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2019/07/27/how-big-stars-maximise-their-take-from-tours
Imperva (2019). How bots affect ticketing, www.imperva.com/resources/resource-library/reports/how-bots-affect-ticketing/
Jancsics, D. (2018). ‘Brokerage (general)’ in Ledeneva, A. (ed.), The global encyclopedia of informality: Understanding social and cultural complexity [vol. 2]. London: UCL Press: 205-208
Jourdan, A. (2016). ‘Scalped: At China's creaking hospitals, illegal ticket touts defy crackdown,’ Reuters, 12 April, www.reuters.com/article/us-china-healthcare-scalpers-idUSKCN0X82O1
Ledeneva, A. (2018). ‘What is informality?,’ The Global Encyclopaedia of Informality Online, www.in-formality.com/wiki/index.php?title=What_is_informality%3F
Lunny, O. (2019). ‘Battle for $15.19 billion secondary ticket market heats up with first Europe-wide anti touting law,’ Forbes, 24 June, www.forbes.com/sites/oisinlunny/2019/06/24/the-battle-for-15-19b-secondary-ticket-market-heats-up-with-first-europe-wide-anti-touting-law/
McVeigh, S. (2006). Concert life in London from Mozart to Haydn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Peters, R. (2020). ‘Motorbike-taxi-drivers as infrastructure in the Indonesian city,’ Ethnos, 85(3): 471-490
Rosbrook-Thompson, J. and Armstrong, G. (2021). ‘Mixed occupancy: Mixed occupations? Inequality and employment on an inner-city housing estate,’ in Pardo, I. and Prato, G. (eds.) Urban Inequalities. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan: 193-214
Sugden, J. (2007). ‘Inside the grafters’ game: An ethnographic examination of football’s underground economy,’ Journal of Sport and Social Issues, 31(3): 242-258
Wenzhao, Z. (2016). ‘“Where did the tickets go?” Ticket touting in China,’ Live Music Exchange Blog, 30 June, livemusicexchange.org/blog/where-did-the-tickets-go-ticket-touting-in-china-zhang-wenzhao/
Zou, T. and Jiang, B. (2020). ‘Integration of primary and resale platforms,’ Journal of Marketing Research, 57(4): 659-676