Robbie Williams tickets for 2017 tour ‘put directly onto re-sale sites by singer’s management team costing fans an extra £65’
Ie:music put tickets up for sale on Get Me In and Seatwave - in one case for an extra £65 on top of the advertised Tickmaster price
ROBBIE Williams’ management team has been accused of placing tickets for his 2017 tour straight on resale sites – costing fans up to £65 more.
Ie:music put tickets up for sale on Get Me In and Seatwave – in one case for an extra £65 on top of the advertised Tickmaster price, the Victoria Derbyshire show found.
Tickets uploaded by Robbie’s management are marked as Platinum on the resale sites, and claim to be: “Official tickets direct from event organiser, dynamically priced according to demand.”
Tickets on Ticketmaster for a level one, block 126 seat at the Etihad Stadium, Manchester on Friday June 2, 2017 are priced at £95 before fees.
On Get Me In, which is owned by Ticketmaster along with Seatwave, a “platinum seat” on level one, block 125 will set a punter back £160 before fees.
As the tickets come straight from Robbie’s management team, they receive all the profit.
When The Sun Online looked at tickets for Friday June 23 at the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park stadium, we found a similar price hike.
Tickets bought directly from Ticketmaster cost £82.50 to sit in block 240.
But tickets uploaded “direct from the event organiser” on GetMeIn cost £130 to sit in Block 232 – which has a much worse view of the stage.
Robbie’s management is run by ie:Music, which has previously called on the Government for stronger action against resale sites.
Ie:music declined to comment.
A Ticketmaster spokesperson said: “Platinum tickets are a very small percentage of the best seats in the house that are priced according to demand, in consultation with our clients, the event organisers.
“The UK live events industry has been successfully using platinum for many years so that the full value of these tickets goes back to the rights holders and not to resellers.”
In November 2015 ie:Music signed a petition saying: “We as artist, managers and agents deplore the increasing industrial-scale abuse and insider exploitation of tickets for music, arts and sports events by ticket touts, and their online associates and facilitators.”
Promoter Harvey Goldsmith slammed the findings, telling Victoria Derbyshire: “I think it is wrong, but hopefully most of the people who have signed the [2015] petition are acting honourably and are doing everything that they can do to prevent tickets being sold on the secondary market.”
Conservative MP Andrew Bingham, part of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, said “somehow, [touts] have worked a way round of abusing this system”.
He added some artists and management teams were “now also complicit in it as well”.
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