The Legal Con of the Booking Fee

If you read my list of good gigs happening in Manchester you will have realised that I don’t like so called “booking fees” on gig tickets especially when they get so high that the “booking fee,” or rip off fee as I shall call it from now on, is higher than the ticket price of a cheap gig. For example I recently paid £3 to see Drink and Drive, yet the rip off fee for the Gang of Four gig is more than that. What is this fee for? Online ticket sellers are unnecessary middle men who need to be paid. It’s a legal scam almost as pernicious as the credit card. They make up their own terms and conditions and prices and screw extra money out of music fans for what? You get a guarantee that you’ll get into a gig, just in case it sells out. However if there were no pre-gig tickets then no gigs would sell out in advance, and if you were worried that a gig would sell out you’d have to turn up early. Of course this would lead to hilarious queues of eager fans forming days before some gigs so might not be such a great idea for certain larger gigs, but for smaller gigs there’s really no reason for not making them pay on the door only and ending this farce of ripping off music fans for the sake of promoter convenience and unnecessary middle man profiteering. Who really benefits from advance tickets aside from the online ticket sellers? It’s the gig promoter of course, and one seller (skiddle) does actually give the promoter the option of paying them the rip off fee themselves. This seems reasonable as there are at least four ways the promoter profits from advance tickets:

1.       They get your money sometimes months before you get to hear the live performance that you paid for.

2.       If someone can’t make the gig and a ticket goes unused, the promoter still gets the entrance fee. However this is a gross disadvantage for music fans as it means one less person will get into a sold out event for every unused ticket, and the venue won’t actually be at legal capacity.

3.       The promoter does not have to make physical tickets or make much effort to sell them. This saves them time and money, yet this saving has been passed on to the music fan in a legal racket that has become normalised.

4.       The promoter has less cash to handle at the gig entrance, so there is less risk of theft.

So if you’re putting on a smaller gig for the love of music, why not consider NOT doing what the big money promoters do? Why not make it pay on the door only like the Eliminator and Aggressive Perfector gig at The Peer Hat?

At the very least it would be nice if promoters would be honest about the entrance fee of a gig. If the only way to buy a ticket is from online sellers, then why advertise a gig as costing £18 when it actually costs £21.45 and it’s impossible to actually buy a ticket for £18? Surely this is false advertising and the promoters should be prosecuted by Trading Standards like a shop would be for doing the same thing. How many shops have you been in that advertise products at a price that doesn’t include VAT then add an extra VAT fee at the till which is quite often higher than the government rate of VAT?

Another idea is that promoters who actually personally know people who come to their gigs could take an advance cash payment for a gig ticket and just put their name on a list so they could avoid the rip off fee.