AIF Launches Ethical Ticket Exchange
- Sell-out festivals Secret Garden, Bestival, Creamfields, End of the Road, Camp Bestival to exclusively use service
11th July 2011, London:- The Association of Independent Festivals has launched a secure ethical ticket exchange, The Ticket Trust. The exchange, at www.thetickettrust.com, will enable festival goers to safely, securely and ethically sell their tickets for sold out events. AIF festivals include Secret Garden Party, Bestival, Camp Bestival, Creamfields and End of the Road Festival. It will also enable festival-goers eager to attend sold-out events to purchase a ticket at face value, without the fear of fraud.Festival-goers who need to legitimately return unwanted tickets will register them onto the site, and then send the tickets to The Ticket Trust for verification before they are made available for sale by The Ticket Trust. The tickets will be sold on at the normal ticket price, plus a handling fee, capped at a maximum of 10%, payable by the buyer. On purchase, the tickets will then be either dispatched securely or held at the event box office for the buyer, with the seller being credited the full ticket price to their bank account. Only authentic tickets will be used by the service and counterfeit tickets will be intercepted and confiscated, helping to protect against fraud. Festivals will take action against those selling counterfeit tickets according to their own Ts and Cs, which could include informing the police and trading standards.While The Ticket Trust is initially being used by AIF member festivals, the exchange can be used by any festival or gig promoters who wish to enable their ticket buyers to sell unwanted tickets ethically. Created in partnership with leading ethical merchandise and e-commerce specialists Sandbag Ltd, the service has been launched in the face of a huge secondary ticket market, which has seen tickets for the forthcoming Secret Garden Party available at almost double the price on secondary ticketing sites. Sandbag have over the last ten years sold tickets globally direct to an artist fanbase, dedicated to doing so without excessive charges, for the likes of Radiohead, R.EM, Adele and Florence and the Machine.The Ticket Trust’s inception comes at a time where ticket fraud cost an estimated £12million in losses in 2010, and when one in 12 ticket buyers have been caught out by scam ticket websites (OFT). It is hoped that the new service from AIF will help reaffirm the importance of the government enforcing the Sale of Tickets Bill, which aims to regulate the selling of tickets for certain sporting and cultural events for profit. Championed by Shadow Education Minister Sharon Hodgson, it has been brought to the forefront with recent fines announced for Olympic Ticket re-selling. AIF vice chair Ben Turner, the initial architect of the Ticket Trust initiative, said “AIF has pulled together its festival members to collectively make a simple message – AIF festivals DO NOT and WILL NOT play the secondary ticketing market for profiteering. AIF stands for strong principles in the festival sector and we object to the practices of many of the so-called secondary ticketing market companies. I heard Christiaan from Sandbag speak at In The City on a panel about this sector and his anger, passion and vision for change inspired me to approach him on-the-spot to partner with AIF on this project. AIF and the Sandbag board, which includes key members of the Radiohead team, have similar values and a will to help improve the situation by offering an alternative way to exchange tickets for non-profit.”Christiaan Munro of Sandbag Limited commented: “Sandbag has been working directly with fans for almost a decade. One of the services we offer is ticketing on behalf of Artists. We secure and sell the best tickets available to the Artist’s loyal fans. We are fortunate enough to work with some amazing acts including Radiohead, REM, Adele, Florence and the Machine and Keane. In the last decade, we have seen the rise of peer-to-peer secondary ticketing initially with auction sites and now with marketplaces set up exclusively to cater to opportunist individuals. There is a finite amount of money that fans have to spend on music and entertainment and we often see tickets we have sold being sold at more than ten times the face value. The increase in ticket price, with profit siphoned away, can only be to the detriment of the music industry as a whole. Secondary ticketing for profit is not yet illegal for concert tickets, but it’s just plain wrong. Fans should not have to pay over the odds for tickets just because one of their peers with no intention of going to the show got in there first.”Radiohead are one of the bands for whom Sandbag provide direct to consumer ticketing solutions for. Radiohead Management, Bryce Edge & Chris Hufford said “Radiohead are fortunate enough to have a loyal and passionate fan base cultivated over many years. Their live shows are well anticipated and rightly create a tangible sense of excitement through innovative staging. In recent years however, the band’s enjoyment of their own shows has been marred by the knowledge that a great many of their fans have been obliged to pay well over face value for their tickets. Secondary ticketing is wrong on so many levels and as management, with ultimate responsibility for the welfare of the band, we must ensure that their fans are treated fairly.”Commented Freddie Fellows, director of Secret Garden Party: “I hope Ticket Trust will finally be able to provide the public with the assurance they need to make it their one-stop shop for ticket transfer. This is really the only way to ensure the public are not being made vulnerable to the mercenary and underhand tactics of the secondary ticket markets.”Rob da Bank, promoter of Bestival added: “The whole secondary ticketing situation makes me really angry, mostly because I just don’t feel many of the people paying vastly inflated prices actually understand the mechanics behind it... and secondly because the people profiting are doing so driven by pure greed. For me music has never been about money and there’s a sharp divide between those in the music business purely for profit and those who are in it for the love of music. The festivals who say they’ve sold out while blatantly putting hundreds or thousands of tickets through a secondary seller are just plain dishonest. I hope that the Ticket Trust can be a safe and secure place for honest ticket trading to take place.”Said Sofia Hagberg, promoter of End of the Road Festival: “Our audience isn’t the kind that would buy extra tickets to sell for a profit, however, touts do. And since the new wave of secondary ticketing outlets that is now available online, there is even more of this happening, with extremely inflated prices. This affects the genuine festival fans, who for one reason or another didn’t manage to buy their tickets in time. It’s not ethical, it’s not right, it’s not on! Hence, we proudly and happily support the work of Ticket Trust as it moves away from this kind of profiteering and supports the genuine festival fans.”Joe Gibbs, promoter of Belladrum Tartan Heart Festival: “We welcome a safe and ethical way for genuine festival-goers to exchange tickets without the distortion of speculation and profiteering and wish Ticket Trust all the very best; we will be urging our audience to use this service in 2011 now that we have sold out.”Oliver Jones, promoter of Deer Shed Festival: “We, like many independent and small festivals, work incredibly hard to keep the price of our tickets as low as possible. Being good value for money is absolutely central to what we do and one of the main reasons we started the festival, as we wanted to offer a reasonable priced weekend for families like ourselves. It’s incredibly frustrating to see individuals using the secondary ticket market to take advantage of people’s desire to attend festivals, especially in this current economic climate. Selling on a ticket you can’t use is an ethical decision and using Ticket Trust is the right decision to make.”Toki Allison, promoter of Nozstock Festival: "Being a proper indie grassroots festival, that has grown from friendships into the major event we are today, we were really excited to hear about the Ticket Trust proposition, and felt this was totally in keeping with the Nozstock ethic and our commitment to supporting a philosophy of fairness and community. As well as protecting the pockets of festival-goers who already face escalating prices on limited budgets, it also helps to support the reputation of festivals and ensure that we continue to bring in a mixed crowd from all walks of life and keep festivals accessible and attainable for everyone."Lee Denny, promoter of LeeFest: "I disagree with the very principle of charging festival goers more for exactly the same experience, but to do it in such a way that it looks like a fan to fan exchange is deceitful and completely wrong. As a small festival organiser, and an avid ticket buyer, I am really looking forward to having a platform like Ticket Trust to highlight and circumvent such bad practice."
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FAQ
Who will be selling their tickets via the site? Anyone who has bought a ticket and found that they genuinely can no longer attend anymore, can sell their ticket for face value on the site.
Do ticketholders have to register and pay a fee to use the service? Ticketholders can register their ticket on the site for free. Purchasers will have to pay a maximum of 10% handling fee. All income will be re-invested into the Ticket Trust.
Do Ticket Trust buy back the tickets instantly so customers are ‘refunded’ or do they have to wait until someone clicks through to purchases their particular ticket? Are users ‘lined up’ in a first come first served basis? Ticket Trust do not buy the ticket back. The seller only gets refunded if someone buys the ticket. It will be on a first come first served basis, no waiting lists will be provided by the site.
If they are being re-sold at the same amount on Ticket Trust, is this only for sold out festivals? Yes, only for sold out events – The Ticket Trust are not taking away the business of the promoter or their initial ticketing companies.
Will ALL AIF members be using this service? It has the backing of all AIF members but Green Man Festival and The Beat-Herder already offer a waiting list for this year’s events and Endorse it in Dorset have a no resale whatsoever policy, so they will not be taking part.
AIF Member festivals (that are still to take place this year) which are on board with the Ticket Trust are:Belladrum Tartan Heart Festival *BestivalCamp BestivalCornburyCreamfieldsDeer-Shed FestivalEnd Of The Road Festival *Field DayGlasgowburyGrassroots FestivalKendall Calling *LeeFestNozstockSecret Garden Party *Summer Sundae WeekenderUnderageWOMADY-Not Festival* Already sold out and will be using the site on launch day for audience to sell unwanted tickets.
Participating festivals will henceforth have a clause added to their ticket T&Cs that details that the ticket can be re-sold on the Ticket Trust website and there will be a link to their website on their site once their event has sold out.
How will it combat ticket fraud in addition to ticket touting? Will there be a fine for those caught re-selling tickets? This will be covered under each event’s own terms and conditions and disabilities policy.
Who are Sandbag and how have they assisted the project? Sandbag is a fully servicing ethical merchandiser and e-commerce specialist. For nearly a decade Sandbag has established and maintained the very important link between artists and their fans as well as NGOs and their supporters. Sandbag sell tickets globally direct to an artist’s fanbase. As an advocate of the fan, Sandbag strives to secure the best tickets available and sell them without excessive charges.They have worked with the likes of R.E.M., Radiohead, Adele, Florence and the Machine, Keane, Sigur Ros, Jessie J, Blink 182 and McFly since their founding in 2001.Working together with the AIF, Sandbag has used its knowledge and experience to establish the most user-friendly method to help exchange unwanted tickets. Sandbag has then built the Ticket Trust website to make this a reality.
Can other venues, festivals, promoters or ticketing agents use the site and service? Yes, any promoter is able to use the Ticket Trust to enable their ticket buyers to sell unwanted tickets at face value.
When will this be? We plan to open up the service during Autumn/Winter 2011.
What is the charge for using the service? There is no charge to sell tickets. Buyers will be charged a 10% handling fee when purchasing.
Shouldn’t this just encourage promoters and ticketing agencies to give refunds and resell tickets themselves? Why don’t they do that anyway to be fair to their customers? Hopefully this initiative will indeed encourage promoters and ticket agencies to offer refunds on sold out shows. Tickets are currently sold on a “sale is final” basis which should not change, as promoters have to invest an incredible amount of money to stage events. The administration of helping to exchange tickets in an ethical manner is expensive, which may be a reason it has not been tackled before. Anything we can do to encourage music fans to change the way they think about how their peers profit from being first in line when tickets go on sale will help the music industry as a whole.
What rights do participating festivals have to implement a form a punishment on those reselling tickets on secondary ticketing sites? AIF members’ tickets that are sold as ‘non transferable’ should not be resold without permission, but sadly this is not currently the case. The Ticket Trust purports to have no rights to intervene in unauthorised sales on secondary ticketing marketplaces. Where a seller attempts to sell counterfeit tickets on The Ticket Trust website, appropriate action will be taken, including informing the police and trading standards. About AIFThe Association of Independent Festivals is a not for profit body set up in 2008 to represent independent music festivals in the UK and Ireland.Conceived by Bestival promoter Rob da Bank and Graphite’s Ben Turner, the association’s founder members included Bestival, Cornbury Festival, Creamfields, Evolution Festival, Field Day/Underage, Secret Garden Party, Summer Sundae Weekender and WOMAD.With 31 members ranging from Bromley’s Leefest to the 55,000 capacity Bestival in the Isle of Wight, AIF enables the promoters of some of the UK & Ireland’s most innovative and successful festivals to speak with one voice when addressing the wider music business and government.AIF aims to establish best practice for festivals in a variety of areas such as security, the environment and beyond, providing a knowledge base for festival promoters, as well as creating collective purchasing and marketing opportunities for its members.AIF operates as an autonomous division of the Association of Independent Music.www.aiforg.com