Just paid £244 for 2 Festival Hall tickets!

Hi guys and gals,

I'm new here so thought I'd say hello.

Yes, you read that right... am I mad? Long story short....

I've been a fan for many years and see Roy whenever he's in London, and occasionally when he's not.

This festival hall malarkee is going to be a big deal, I reckon, and being on the Roy Harper mailing list I knew the minute the tickets went on sale. When I checked though, all the front stall seats had already been taken. I have a friend in the 'biz' that told me if I ever needed VIP tickets, boxes, etc to give her a call so obviously I called her and she said 'no problem, leave it with me'.

She called me yesterday to say, 'Sorry, can't do it mate'. How gutted was I? I should have bought a couple of £30 tickets anyway as insurance!

So today I've had to go to those hateful ticket tout sites, sorry I mean, those sites where genuine people who genuinely bought a ticket but genuinely now can't make it and so will flog their tickets onto mugs like me for three times the face value.

Then you add the £44 booking fee and everyone's happy.... well, except for me who would much rather have given the money to Roy than some arse that wants to make money out of him and probably doesn't even know who he is.

Sorry... just had to get that off my chest.

BUT... I'm going. And in twenty years I'll look back and won't even remember the nasty money stuff. And if I hadn't bought the tickets... well, I'd have regretted it for years.

Hopefully see some of you guys there... I got rear stalls...BB.

 

well £244 for 2 tickets sounds like a bargain ... compared to the £209 some of us spend for 1 ticket at the Chiswick gig earlier this year !!

 

Yeah, I went to that too, bought two tickets for that but I didn't mind the price because it went to Roy and the team, plus I got to sit and have a beer and a chat with him too. Money well spent.

 

The bar was a lot cheaper than the RFH will be too!

I've been looking at Ebay sales of RFH tickets and they appear to be going for anything from £167 to £260 for a pair.

 

It was free 'champagne' if I remember rightly. All night. Tasted like cack but did the job. A little to well actually cos I don't remember much of my little chat with Roy. Think he was knackered though to be fair and probably didn't need another dribbling idiot like me telling him how amazing he is. Ah well. I did better when I bumped into Jimi Page when Roy played the Jazz Cafe last year!

 

Sorry to hear you paid so much for the tickets. I was hoping the RH fans had a bit more about them, than to put them on ebay for inflated prices.
This is a pet hate of mine. When Peter Kay & Roger Waters announced just a few dates initially for their tours, the tickets were snapped up and loads went straight onto ebay. Then they both added lots more dates to presumably satisfy demand. Hopefully a lot of the ebay touts will have had their fingers burned, after holding loads of tickets they couldn't sell for profit.

 

I would have thought the fans wouldn't sell, they would probably want to be there - then again, if one managed to buy a couple more than one needed, selling them might cover the fees and commissions etc... :confused1:

 

I agree ... sort off !! I am totally against people who buy tickets just to sell on at a profit ( even though it is a free enterprise ); but if I did have a couple of spare tickets for a gig ( like Roys ) then to me it wouldn't feel right selling those tickets to someone I knew ( ie someone on Stormcock ) for a profit ... but if I didn't know anyone who really wanted to go, then of course I would end up on a ticket site or eBay to sell them. The problem is that you can not be 100% certain that whoever buys your tickets are really fans and that they will end up at the gig. I mean there is no point in selling the tickets at face value, because all that means is that a tout will buy them and then sell them off at a profit .... if ANYONE should make a profit on these, it should be me and not the tout - of course in this situation, the money should go to the artist or maybe some charity ... but that all depends on how skint I was at the time :wink:

 

fair point Chris. I'm quite trusting, and never have thought that to sell them on for face value, you could be selling to a tout.

 

Ha!

Ha! If you found money in the street would you hand it into the nearest police station?

Andi:biggrin:

 

SCALP'em Tonto!

When I was younger, scalping any tickets to a public event was illegal in this country. I wondered why people were doing it anyway outside an event and the police usually looked the other way.

Now that it's legal, at least most of the time and through "authorized resellers," I don't like it, except when scalpers get burned.

Now it's up to individual artists like Bruce Springsteen and Dave Matthews to fight and prosecute violators of their stricter rules. Of course, Bruce may have played his last gig ever. And Dave arranged special outdoor sites to limit potential scalper profits earlier this year.

No one EVER thought twice about selling to a friend at face value, but even that was once illegal!

 

There is a flip side to this too, that being that touts get left holding tickets sometimes. I've stood around and waited outside gigs until there was noone left to sell to, and then picked up tickets for less than cost price. Not recommended, but wworks if you're prepared to have a gamble

 

And there's yet another side to this as well.

I e-mailed SeeTickets, from whom I've bought a lot of tickets, and asked them why they promoted Viagogo, the cess pit if ticket touts, through their e-mail campaign recently. I asked where they got off promoting these turds who are doing more harm to the music industry than good.

Their reply was surprising, at first, but then started to make sense.

Basically they told me that Viagogo et al, are not all about the touts. Promoters, including SeeTickets, also use those sites to sell tickets because they can then 'let market forces dictate the value'.

So they saw it a little like an auction whereby if some mug like me is prepared to pay hundreds for a ticket, then they are happy to take it.

You can't fault the logic, and I guess that's Capitalism. I am a capitalist (boo, hiss, I hear you say) but as long as it's regulated. The trick is in the balancing of the the regulation. Too much and it doesn't work. Not enough, and you get trouble.

When it comes to the music biz, money is a weird one. On one end of the scale, I was more than happy to pay £135 to see Roger Waters The Wall at the O2. Brilliant show, worth every penny. And a month later I paid £10 to see Alexi Murdoch at the Borderline. Brilliant gig, worth far more than a tenner.

But then you have Simon Cowell, coining it in large with utter dross like X-Factor. I have nothing against Simon, big respect to the guy, but like an unregulated capitalist economy he's becoming a monopoly on music. He's controlling what most people are listening to... and it's not good. He no doubt can't stand it himself but in his shoes, I'd probably do the same.

It'll be interesting to see where all this is going. Musicians (real musicians) struggle to make money these days unless they go on tour. This is good for real music lovers like us and I've seen more live music over the last two or three years than in the previous ten!

Got my tickets through this morning... face value £30. It still hurts....

 

"You will obey me while I lead you
And eat the garbage that I feed you
Until the day that we don't need you
Don't go for help . . . no one will heed you
Your mind is totally controlled
It has been stuffed into my mold
And you will do as you are told
Until the rights to you are sold"

Lyrics from "I'm The Slime"..Wise words from FZ, from 1973!

 

Good old Frank, a very wise man.
I wonder what Slimy Simon listens to at home?
No doubt he'd be jumping on the "kiss Roy's arse bandwagon" if he thought there was a few quid in it.

 

There's another guy selling a couple of tickets on eBay for £100 ... and he gives a sob story that, he paid over the odds for the tickets but alas he can't go any more ..... BUT do not feel sorry for him ... because if you look at his feedback, he seems to be a very unfortunate person ( or a liar ) because he seems to have HAD to sell a lot of tickets in the past !!!!

 

and the person who's put 4 on ebay for £1000.

good to see the note from Tracey to say someone can't go and is trying to sell them for £25 or will return them to the festival hall.

 

Not sure Graham ( who started this thread ) will be that overjoyed !!

 

Not really..Rocking horse turd has always been expensive!