A Christmas Tale: Greed, Hypocrisy And Rock & Roll

THERE WAS ONCE a young man called Jack who loved music. He spent a large part of his disposable income on all the new releases and on tickets for gigs. He especially loved a song called Trains to Brazil by a band called Guillemots, and one day he read in the NME they were due to play a gig in the nearby city of Edinburgh. His excitement was slightly dented when he rang the venue - a dark, mysterious cellar selling over-priced drinks called The Liquid Room - and found out that it didn’t have a box office and so couldn’t sell the £8 tickets directly to him. He would have to buy them via the internet or telephone from a big, international agency called Ticketmaster, who would charge him a “service charge” of £1.20 per ticket, and another £1.60 to post them to him. Alternatively, he could buy them from an Edinburgh record shop called Ripping Records, where the service charge would “probably be cheaper”.
Jack had been planning a trip to Edinburgh that week anyway – he had an interview for a job as a “river watcher” - so decided to buy his tickets from Ripping Records. When he got to the shop, which was at one end of a stone bridge overlooking the city’s main railway station and in the shadow of a big castle, Jack was told the “service charge” was £1.50 per ticket. So two tickets with “£8.00” printed on them would actually cost £19. He was a bit shocked by this, so asked the man what the “service charge” was for. “It pays us for selling the tickets,” said the man. Jack noticed the tickets were branded with the Ticketmaster logo and the name of the promoter, DF Concerts. So he asked who kept the service charge. The man, who was actually the shop manager called John Richardson, said: “In general we keep the booking fee, though in some cases a part is passed on to a promoter or agent. Obviously I am not at liberty to discuss a third party’s business.” Jack really, really wanted to see Guillemots play live, so he decided to sacrifice his lunch to be able to afford the two £8 tickets which now mysteriously cost £9.50. But during his train ride home, he thought it was very strange that the shop could charge a supplement of more than 20 per cent for the “service” of handing a couple of tickets across the counter to a customer.
By the time he reached home, the thought of someone making such a disproportionately large profit at the expense of impoverished music fans like him had made Jack very angry. Almost as angry as he’d been when he discovered his bank was charging him £35 each time he went over his overdraft limit. Which he’d been doing quite a lot, recently. Now, even listening to the bewitching piano intro to Guillemots debut album couldn’t mellow Jack’s mood. So he snapped open his laptop and went to the Ticketmaster website. There, he found this explanation under “Service Charges”.
“As an authorised ticket agent, we negotiate our charges with venue operators, promoters and others based on costs involved in both their presentation of the event and our services with respect to the ticketing of their events. The actual amount is determined by agreement with the venue or promoter for each event. Reduced fees may be available by purchasing tickets directly at the box office.

“The charges pay for our credit/debit card processing services, merchant fees, distribution network, the installation and maintenance of computer hardware and software, telephone lines, labour and all other costs associated with the ticket transaction.”

THIS just made Jack even more angry, even more so than when he’d found out “river-watching” was actually a physically-challenging job potentially involving dangerous confrontations with armed poachers, not the sitting in a deckchair for eight hours a day monitoring water levels which he’d originally thought.(Which is probably why he never got the job) When he’d handed over his cash at Ripping Records, it hadn’t required the use of any “credit/debit card processing, distribution network, computer hardware or software” or “telephone lines”. It had simply involved a sales assistant ripping a couple of tickets out of a book and handing them across the counter together with his change.
Noting the line in the first paragraph in which Ticketmaster said it negotiated its charges with venues and promoters, Jack got in touch with The Liquid Room. Events Manager Kathrin Mackenzie-Gee sent him a very short reply:
“The gig is actually being promoted by DF Concerts and is not a Liquid Room show. I have no hold or control as to how and by what method DF sell their tickets. If it was a Liquid Room show, then the booking fee would be cheaper.”
Jack was getting more and more exasperated. It reminded him of that palaver he’d had with his local branch of Morrisons when they’d put up signs saying “up to 30 per cent off all Spanish and South American wines” and after spending half-an-hour going through the shelves he discovered that not a single bottle was reduced in price. It seemed to him that no-one was prepared to take responsibility for the “service charge”. So once he’d calmed down, he wrote a couple of letters, one to Ticketemaster and the other to Geoff Ellis, the director of DF Concerts. DF Concerts were famous because every year in Scotland they hosted “T in the Park”, a two day outdoor music festival which attracted thousands of music fans from all over Britain and had won numerous industry awards. Jack had been to a few of these festivals himself so, after complimenting Geoff on some of the bands he’d seen there and explaining all about what had happened with his Guillemots tickets, he wrote:
“I’m just a simple soul at heart, but this is the way I see it. You, as promoters, have a product, Guillemots, to sell. You need a venue, which in this case is the Liquid Room. So anything you charge for tickets will obviously have to include payment for, at the least, the band and the venue. It seems to me that in this case – Guillemots being a new, uncharted band - £8 per ticket is a fair price to cover these elements. So why do you need to muddy the waters with extra, hidden(i.e. not printed on the ticket) charges?
“There’s a remarkable parallel in the world of business with, for example, farmers who want to sell their sprouts, or publishers who want to sell their magazines. They, too, need a venue for their products, which is usually a supermarket or newsagent. The difference is that when I go to buy my pound of sprouts or copy of Word, I’m not suddenly expected to pay 20 per cent more than the price on the bag or magazine.
“I can’t help feeling that despite your nice, glossy website and all those awards you trumpet, there’s a murkier side to your business. You’re ripping off me and thousands of other music lovers, aren’t you?
“I look forward to your detailed response.”

WHEN it arrived, Geoff’s response wasn’t quite as detailed as Jack had hoped. In fact, most of it was about a subject of no relevance to Jack’s complaint at all. It went like this:
Firstly, if I can explain the issue of booking fees. The live industry accepts that nobody will ever enjoy paying a booking fee on a ticket. However, the fact is that a service is being provided by a commercial organisation, be it TicketMaster, Ripping or anyone else. My concern is to ensure that booking fees are kept to a reasonable level. I think for Ripping Records to charge £1.50 on an £8 ticket is not unreasonable for the service that they provide. I understand your query as to why, effectively, the face value of the ticket is not £9.50 and any service charge made by a ticket agent is kept within the gross price. There are three reasons for this:
The accounting for VAT from two different organisations
The fact that [the Performing Rights Society] takes 3 % after VAT of the gross ticket price. This would then mean that PRS are receiving an income that they are not entitled to and would subsequently mean that ticket prices would have to increase to cover this.
Artists often look at there(sic) earnings of(sic) a relative percentage to the gross box office receipts and therefore, whilst their earnings might remain the same, there(sic) share as a percentage of the gross ticket price would be reduced. Having the booking fee on the top enables the customer to see exactly how much they are paying for this service.
I wholeheartedly agree with your complaint that there is nowhere for you to purchase the ticket at face value and this is down to the Liquid Room not operating any kind of box office facility, unlike many other venues. We have encouraged many Scottish venues, such as the Academy and ABC, to ensure that they provide a box office facility, with no charge to the customer for tickets purchased in person with cash. One option for us is to refuse to put concerts in the Liquid Room until they provide such a facility. However this would deny audiences the opportunity to see most of the bands who we put on there, as the Queens Hall and Assembly Rooms, which are a similar size, are often not viable options.
I have spent considerable time and resources on fighting what I see to be a much bigger issue for the live music fan and that is the increased amount of ticket touting that takes place via unauthorised ticket agents……..
The final half page of Geoff’s letter went on to blow his company’s trumpet about its efforts to stamp out ticket touting. In the process, he appeared blithely oblivious to the fact that touting, i.e. the selling on of tickets by a third party at an inflated price, sounded suspiciously like Ripping Records selling Jack a ticket for a Guillemots gig with a 20 per cent mark up. And yet he had spent the first half of his letter robustly defending this practice, writing that he thought it was not unreasonable for Ripping Records to charge Jack £3 for handing a couple of tickets to him across a counter in a shop where the sales staff were already highly practised in, and adequately recompensed for, the art of handing things across counters. No specialist training or equipment had been involved in the transaction. Yet if Jack had bought, say, ten tickets, the shop would have charged him £15 for providing exactly the same service – handing something across the counter.
One line stood out in Geoff’s letter: My concern is to ensure that booking fees are kept to a reasonable level.
It just so happened that soon afterwards, tickets for “T in the Park” went on sale. Jack couldn’t afford to go this year, as a result of his spectacular failure to land the river watcher’s job, but one of his friends had managed to obtain a pair of tickets. The cover price of the tickets was £56.50 each. But Jack’s friend, along with thousand of other music lovers, ended up paying a total of £131 for his two tickets. This included “booking”, “processing” and – most memorably – “convenience” fees. He’d had to pay an extra £18 for his two tickets. And yet there was Geoff Ellis telling Jack: My concern is to ensure that booking fees are kept to a reasonable level. (Meanwhile, Ticketmaster never replied at all)

SO Jack decided to compare DF Concerts’ and Ticketmaster’s “fees” with those levied by comparable-sized promoters and ticket agents elsewhere in Britain. As DF Concerts has a virtual monopoly in Scotland, this meant looking south of the border. The main players in England are promoters SJM and Metropolis Music. Together with ticket agency See Tickets, they run a booking website called GigsandTours. Jack spent a rainy afternoon comparing the prices there with the prices offered by DF Concerts via the Ticketmaster website(most tickets for gigs promoted by DF Concerts are sold through Ticketmaster). He looked at gigs on both sides of the border featuring The Maccabees, The Holloways and Duke Special. This is what he found:
A ticket for The Maccabees at King Tuts in Glasgow on 7 February next year will cost you £7. On top of this is a “service charge” of £1.45 and “order processing fee” of £2.25. The “order processing fee” covers standard postage. If you would rather collect your ticket from the box office yourself, you still have to pay the £2.25. That’s right. The “order processing fee” covers the cost of DF Concerts allowing you to travel to the King Tuts box office at your own expense to collect your ticket. King Tuts, by the way, is owned and operated by DF Concerts.
A ticket to see The Maccabees at the Night and Day Bar in Manchester on 26 February will also cost you £7. The “booking fee” is £1, and the “transaction charge” – which covers standard postage – is £2. So that’s a saving of 45 pence per ticket, and 25 pence on the postal charges, if you’re lucky enough to live in England.
For The Holloways at King Tuts on 27 February or at Manchester University on the 17th, the ticket prices are £8.50 and £8 respectively, and the extra charges for one ticket – including DF Concerts’ “order processing fee” for allowing you to collect your ticket yourself from the box office - add up to £3.70 and £3 respectively.
For Duke Special at King Tuts on 9 February or The Social in Nottingham on the 19th, the ticket price is the same at £7. But those extra charges add up to £3.70 and £3.25 respectively.
There was one other, significant difference between buying a ticket for a DF Concerts gig via Ticketmaster and doing the same for an SJM/Metropolis Music gig via See Tickets. At every stage of the operation with Ticketmaster, a message appears "threatening" that if you do not select your tickets "within two minutes", or complete the transaction "within one minute", the tickets will "be released for others to buy". Jack thought this put unfair and unnecessary pressure on the customer. There was no such pressure at See Tickets.

After his afternoon on the computer, Jack’s mind was well and truly boggled, and not just because he’d accidentally visited some strange websites featuring naked women and animals of the Serengeti. While the extra charges appeared unjustified in all cases, they seemed especially unfair for music fans living in Scotland. Jack looked at the letter from Geoff Ellis once more: My concern is to ensure that booking fees are kept to a reasonable level. If that was true, why was old Ebenezer Ellis charging punters an “order processing fee” of £2.25 even if they collected their tickets from the box office? If his concern really was to ensure that booking fees are kept to a reasonable level, why couldn’t he bring his “extras” down to the same level as those in England, even if that meant having to ditch his partnership with Ticketmaster and hook up with the biggest UK-owned ticket company, See Tickets, instead? As Jack had written in his original letter to Ellis, if a big, prestigious player like DF Concerts led the way in abandoning or reducing booking fees, other promoters might follow suit and music fans would forever toast the name of DF Concerts for making their lives better.
JACK decided to get in touch with a big organisation that is supposed to keep an eye on the behaviour of greedy businessmen and lying hypocrites, called the Office of Fair Trading. He obtained its report on the subject of booking fees from January 2005 grandly entitled “OFT Raises the Curtain on Ticket Agents”. It waffled on for more than 100 pages of notes, footnotes and annexes before reaching the stunning conclusion:
“Ticket agents can provide a better and fairer service for consumers. Clearer price information and the elimination of unfair contract terms would improve choice and value for the public.”
Even more underwhelming was its recommendation:
“…that, in order to improve the standard of contracts in the industry, the Society of Ticket Agents and Retailers (STAR) produce model terms for its members and the OFT is currently working with STAR in producing these terms.”
That was no bloody use, thought Jack, so he turned to another, more local watchdog, Edinburgh City Council’s Trading Standards department. The news from Philip Morrison, “Senior Officer, Retail Monitoring”, was just as depressing. He told Jack that, unlike with goods, there was no legal requirement for “services” to be priced, so there was no obligation for Ripping Records, Ticketmaster or whoever to print the cost of the service charge on their tickets(though it must be clearly displayed in any advertising). Therefore, it wasn’t a “hidden” charge. This reflects that the cost of the “service” can vary from outlet to outlet. Maybe some shops have a far wider counter to hand the tickets across, thought Jack, or the book of tickets is kept upstairs, and that obviously requires more effort on the part of staff. Ironically, and rather sadly, in this particular case it was the small, neighbourhood retailer who was being shamed by the big, global corporation. Ripping Records – with the endorsement of DF Concerts - was charging a massive £1.50 booking fee, compared with Ticketmaster’s £1.20. If that didn’t eloquently expose the iniquity of “service charges”, thought Jack, then I’m Mick Hucknall’s secret love child.
Finally, Philip confirmed that there was no new legislation on the horizon, and that all the Office of Fair Trading was doing – in conjunction with that other ferocious guardian of customers’ rights, the Advertising Standards Authority – was suggesting a voluntary code for ticket agencies to regulate themselves with.
Blimey, thought Jack, these consumers’ watchdogs don’t have much bite. So he decided he should write to Ebenezer Ellis at DF Concerts again. Maybe the poor man was under a lot of stress and didn’t realise how mercenary and callous it looked for his company to be charging people an “order processing fee” of £2.25 just for them to be allowed to collect their tickets from the box office.
But despite waiting two months, and despite it being nearly Christmas, Ebenezer Ellis never bothered to reply, which made Jack very sad.
Luckily, Jack had also written to Tennent’s, a big company that makes beer. They sponsor DF Concerts’ “T in the Park” festival, so Jack thought they should know about the excessive levels of “booking”, “processing” and “convenience” fees which DF slaps on top of tickets for this event. A very nice man called George Kyle wrote back, telling Jack:
I am currently getting some background on the charging of "booking fees" around events and will come back to you. Obviously this is a business decision by event promoters based on the commercial realities of their individual gigs / events and Tennent's ability to influence this is minimal(even with our relationships across T in the Park, T on the Fringe, Triptych & T Break)
Happy to send you a couple of cases of Tennent's Lager as a token of our appreciation for continuing to support our music events.
So while Jack is resigned to having to continue paying exorbitant extra charges for the “service” of being handed tickets across a shop or box office counter – at least until old Ebenezer Ellis lives up to his words about ensuring that booking fees are kept to a reasonable level or the Office of Fair Trading gets round to taking some proper action - he is at least able to console himself by getting very, very pissed this festive season.
STOP PRESS! This week DF Concerts and Ticketmaster launched their latest money-spinner, a new outdoor music festival at Inveraray Castle in Argyll next August. The website for the three-day Connect festival offers "early bird" prices of £70 for punters who want to book now, even though no acts have yet been confirmed. But of couse, the tickets will cost significantly more by the time you have added on "service charge" of £6.75 PER TICKET and "order processing fee" of £4.95.

This week, Jack Havana recommends......

......that you tell these money-grabbing bastards - promoters, ticket agencies, venues, record shops -to fuck off by boycotting their festivals and gigs. Stay at home and listen to the CD instead. At least the drinks will be cheaper. These are the greedy hypocrites who are killing live music. The OFT don't appear to want to do anything about it, so it's up to us music fans. By clicking on the envelope icon below, you can effortlessly and easily forward this story to all interested parties, whether they be fellow music lovers, bands, festival sponsors, the music press or even your bloody MP. Make Jack happy this Christmas and forward this story to at least one other person. Click on the envelope now!

© Jack Havana 2006. Reproduction in part or whole prohibited without Jack’s say-so.

JACK HAVANA WILL BE BACK IN THE NEW YEAR. BAH HUMBUG TO YOU ALL!