Ticketmaster has announced today that it will be shutting down the ticket resale sites GetMeIn and Seatwave this year. However, fans will still be able to sell tickets using a new ‘exchange service’.
From this week (Monday 13th August) no new events will be added to the site for tickets to be attached to on either GetMeIn or Seatwave. The UK and Irish versions of both marketplaces will close for good in October and equivalent sites in Europe will follow suit before the end of the year.
Ticketmaster will then be launching a new ‘exchange’ service and some details are available. People with tickets will be able to sell them directly on Ticketmaster but with specific rules. The price can only be equal or less than the face value of the ticket and there will be a fee of 15% on the sale price. And when examining where you want to sit, there will be an indication of whether buyers are seeing ‘new’ from the promoter or venue or whether it’s a ‘resold’ ticket.
We know that fans are tired of seeing others snap up tickets just to resell for a profit on secondary websites, so we have taken action. Closing down our secondary sites and creating a ticket exchange on Ticketmaster has always been our long-term plan. Selling tickets through Ticketmaster is really simple: We do all the hard work and outline the maximum that can be charged for the ticket – and it doesn’t cost fans a penny to sell them. Our new Ticketmaster ticket exchange lets fans sell tickets they can’t use directly through their Ticketmaster account, for the price originally paid or less.
– Andrew Parsons, head of Ticketmaster UK
This basically ends ‘touting’ on the Ticketmaster sites and will be welcomed by artists and many fans who have long condemned the ticket resale ‘secondary market’. In particular, many were frustrated by companies using ‘automatic bots’ to snap up dozens of tickets specifically for resale at sometimes hugely inflated prices.
But merchants in the business of selling tickets can still sell tickets commercially on other services such as Viagogo and the eBay owned tickets marketplace Stubhub.
One Response
15% of the sale fee (plus, presumably, the lack of refund of the original booking fee) is pretty steep. Resident Advisor, a similar ticket site for club nights, only retain the booking fee. If I was faced with those costs I would likely go sell elsewhere