I’m pleased to see the
Royal Albert Hall has announced changes to the way its members are able to
dispose of unwanted tickets for charity concerts. Earlier this week there was a kerfuffle when news emerged that a couple of its wealthy patrons were making tidy profits on the secondary
ticket resale market, with those for Roger Daltrey and Paul Weller's Teenage Cancer Trust benefit concert selling at
up to £299 apiece against a face value of £50.
Members of the Royal
Albert Hall pay around £1000 per seat to the charity – the Royal Albert Hall,
this is (yes, it does seem rather incredible that such a venerable institution
has charitable status) – and in return have a certain number of seats allocated
for each performance. This allows them to show largesse and entertain family,
friends and clients. Not no one likes every act that takes to the stage, nor
has the time to go to every performance, so for those events for which they
have surplus tickets, selling them to someone who can use them makes sense.
Giving them to someone
who can use of them makes even more sense. Having got ‘cheap’ seats to see PJ Harvey at the Royal Albert Hall last year, imagine my delight when while queuing
for the lift to take us up to the ‘gods’
at the top of the auditorium, a lady who holds a number of seats in the
stalls offered me a pair for the third row – for free. It was a fantastic gift
and a matter of pure chance that I was in the right place at the right time. It’s
also in complete contrast to the attitude of the other debenture members who
have been criticised for selling theirs and profiting from doing so.
Inability to secure
concert tickets is the bane of every music fan’s life. Your favourite act
finally tours and you can’t get tickets for love nor constant redial or web
page refresh. Moments after the event sells out, tickets magically appear on a
secondary sale site at hugely inflated prices. Entrepreneurial, yes, but one
that comes at great expense to the average music fan. The same thing happens
for other high profile events, but the Glastonbury Festival has become the
standard-bearer for this nefarious business.
When Arctic Monkeys
announced their first UK tour as a headline act, I found myself on the
receiving end of this. An eBay bidding novice, I grew tired of constantly being
outbid at the last minute for every ticket I went for (I soon learned about
auto-bidding tools, but not before the tickets were gone and my patience
exhausted).
I soon discovered face
value tickets were available for the same tour in Germany and Holland, but
eventually plumped for Philadelphia – an extravagant option, but less so as I
was able to combine it with a long overdue return to visit a dear friend in New
York and my first holiday in some years. My ticket cost $15.
Such options have now
become fairly standard, with travel packages for festival fans being offered.
In the case of the
Royal Albert Hall tickets, of course, something else was at play. Profiting
from the fact you are automatically allocated tickets is one thing, but it
feels immoral when you’re doing so for a charity concert. The performers and
promoters were giving their time and talents for free (and rightly getting
publicity and goodwill in return, natch).
I was lucky enough to
attend the first ever Teenage Cancer Trust concerts and have been to four in
all over the years. One year, having delivered to its modest office some
donated items for distribution around the various cancer wards that the Teenage
Cancer Trust has been instrumental in creating, I was asked whether I’d be
interested in buying a ticket for one of the events. These, I was told, were
tickets that supporters of various types were unable to make use of, and had
therefore returned to the charity so they could be sold and more money raised.
Surely this is what is
supposed to happen. That or give the unwanted tickets to the kids on behalf of
whom Teenage Cancer Trust is fundraising. There’s also a group of kids in
attendance at these concerts, bravely declaring their intention to battle on
through a horrible disease.
I’m sure many more
kids – with cancer or without but facing challenging circumstances all the same
– would love the chance to attend. Now the Charity Commission, organiser Harvey
Goldsmith and the board of the Royal Albert Hall have stepped in to prevent
such profiteering, it’s possible many more of them will get the chance to do
so.
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