For those that like attending gigs (I loathe that word for some reason).. anyway “music events”, you will appreciate the bizarre way that the ticket market operates. The ticket price may be £20-£150 but there is invariably a handling/postage fee which makes the ticket agency a fair profit I suspect. Anyway, apart from this gripe, I am also increasingly annoyed by the way that “events” are promoted. For example, Coldplay (Britain’s biggest band at the moment and one that I have liked for many years and seen them live on numerous occasions) have a new album “Mylo Xyloto” and are beginning a world tour. Tickets are sold out within minutes of being released online, jamming up various Internet servers. In theory you can only buy 4 tickets at a time for most bands. Yet no sooner is the panic over as you purchase the last remaining tickets, than a new date is announced – the following day.

Now I’m fairly sure that venues probably need a little more notice than what appears to be an impulsive reaction to the huge demand for tickets. It smacks of a con and must surely be market manipulation. I’m not citing Coldplay as unique in this, they all do it – and frankly it probably has almost nothing to do with the bands and everything to do with the promoters.

To make matters worse, ticket agencies seem to be allocated loads of tickets and then sell these on at a premium, even when an event is sold out, clearly it isn’t ever sold out. Turning up to the actual event also reveals a considerable number of “empty seats” – whoever the band is.

Within the financial services industry regulation makes market fixing illegal. Prices are meant to represent the real metrics of supply and demand.

Coldplay tickets can be found at their own site, but it will redirect you to Ticketmaster – so if you would like a little more choice, here are just a few of those of the first page of google.

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