It’s easy to beat up on Ticketmaster and anytime there is a big event with high demand, politicians love to pile on.
That’s exactly what is happening right now with people like Premier Doug Ford trying to show he understands the little guy byraging against high ticket prices for the Blue Jaysand the World Series.
Ford took direct aim at Ticketmaster on Wednesday even though they aren’t the right target for his outrage, or at least not the only one.
“They’re gouging the people. When you have one player in the market that controls the tickets, that’s not right for the people,” Ford told reporters at Queen’s Park.
Ford returned to the issue of high ticket prices on Thursday morning with comments about the Blue Jays at the end of a news conference.
“Go Jays go!” Ford said. “I’m gonna be sitting in my man cave, because I’m not paying whatever, $1,500 for a ticket, and by the way, those ticket gougers, they’re gonna pay the price, we’re gonna get to them.”
It’s not illegal to sell tickets above face value in Ontario, but there are rules around the practice even if they aren’t enforced.
Did you know that websites such as StubHub, SeatGeek and Vivid allow people to offer tickets for sale without verifying that the ticket actually exists? It’s called speculative selling; it’s against the law in Ontario, but it isn’t enforced, so the ticket resale sites allow it to happen.
To resell your ticket on Ticketmaster, it has to be verified.
Ticketmaster has tools available to limit the reselling of tickets
This isn’t an ad or defence of Ticketmaster for the insane prices being charged, but this is reality.
The company, which does have a near monopoly on major events, has all kinds of tools available to limit the reselling of tickets.
For example, when Neil Young played Budweiser Stage last year, he stipulated that tickets could only be transferred once – it doesn’t stop all scalping, but it makes it harder. It was the same with some of the measures used around Oasis such as only releasing the tickets close to the time of the concert, which made it harder to resell at the last minute.
Ticketmaster also has the ability to restrict the resale of tickets to face value.
The view of Ticketmaster though is that the client has to ask for those measures to be put in place, and not all artists, sports teams or leagues want that to happen.
The Blue Jays aren’t even in charge of setting prices or distributing the tickets. For the duration of the World Series, that’s all decided by Major League Baseball.
MLB set the initial sale price of the tickets. As Ticketmaster pointed out in a statement, they don’t control the resale price that someone may be charging.
“It’s important to know that Ticketmaster doesn’t set or control ticket prices – and especially not the resale prices that are justifiably getting so much attention. Those are set by individual sellers, many of which are professional ticket resellers looking to sell at the highest prices the market will bear,” the company said.
This doesn’t mean Ticketmaster is an angel in all of this, they are a business making money off of providing a service, but some of the fees charged are astronomical.
As I write there are a pair of tickets going for $8,016 each but added onto each of them is a service fee of $1,523.04, which means all in the final price for the two tickets comes in at $19,078.08. Ticket reselling sites also charge similar fees for their products.
After getting elected in 2018, the Ford government repealed part of the law governing ticket resales, specifically a section that restricted resale prices to no more than 50% above face value. They repealed it claiming that it was difficult to enforce, which was true, which is why bringing that idea back now in the face of anger would be foolish.
There are things the government could do to try and work with the industry to improve things, but banning resale or capping prices hasn’t worked well elsewhere and won’t work here.
Scalping tickets is as old as events – the government should focus on things that work and not try to end a service most of us have used at some point.
