Big Day Out’s Sydney show sold out in 15 minutes today.  Almost simultaneously, scalped tickets appeared on ebay for $300 – double their face value.

It seems every year the ticket scalping issue rears its ugly head again. A few months ago, AC-DC’s sold out stadium tour brought a similar outpouring of consumer anger and frustration.  The biggest loser in all this, as always, is the loyal ticket buying public.  But for all the Facebook hate groups, forum rants and media articles, what’s been done to fix the issue?Apart from a small minority of pro-active promoters (whose venues are not contracted to Ticketek and Ticketmaster) not a whole lot from what I can tell.

Big Day Out use venues which are contracted to Ticketmaster.  But Ticketmaster don’t seem too interested in developing a system that eradicates scalping.  In fact, if you followed the Bruce Springsteen saga in the US, they appear to be the biggest scalper of all.

Ebay are often singled out as the bad guy for selling scalped tickets.  When the same issue occurred with AC-DC back in May, ebay took the unusual step of speaking out to defend its position, blaming the promoters.

In an article here, EBay Australia spokesperson, Daniel Feiler, said “When you dump 500,000 tickets on the market in one day, when computer systems [become overloaded] by the major ticket sellers – and they do seem to [become overloaded] around these blockbuster events – it’s little wonder that [ticket scalping] happens,” he said.

“When there are promoters who are putting in the effort to make a difference and make sure genuine fans get tickets in the first case, I don’t know why these other promoters can’t employ similar practices.”

Feiler singled out Splendour in the Grass as an event that made efforts to stop scalping.

“They staggered the release of tickets, limited the number anyone could buy down to a low number and people had to come to the concert with their ID,” he said. “It’s not [eBay’s] job to help promoters get tickets into the hands of genuine fans.”

As an owner of the ticketing company (Qjump) that helped Splendour eradicate scalping completely, I have a vested interest here.  I don’t expect Big Day Out or AC-DC’s promoters to be knocking on our door anytime soon, because the venues they use are contracted to either Ticketek or Ticketmaster.

The promoters have very little choice but to use these venues, so really the blame has to sit with the ticketing providers who hold the ticketing contracts.  Why is it, when there are simple, proven systems that they could implement to stop scalping that Ticketek and Ticketmaster continue to ignore the issue?