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Legal
German courts ban Depeche Mode ticket resales
By CMU Editorial | Published on Thursday 28 May 2009
So, here’s an interesting development in the good old secondary ticketing story coming from Germany, where a court has banned a secondary ticketing website from selling tickets to the upcoming Depeche Mode tour in the country.
The promoter of said tour, one Marek Lieberberg, took ticketing portal Ventic, owned by Dutch company Smartfox Media, to court after they began reselling tickets for Depeche Mode gigs which they had bought off the promoter’s company, or third parties. The lawsuit was based on the fact the terms and conditions attached to the tickets ban their resale, which, therefore, technically speaking puts Ventic, and any third parties they represent, in breach of contract. More than that, Leiberberg’s legal people argued that because Ventic knew they planned to resell the tickets despite it being forbidden by the t+cs, and because they hid that intent from the official ticket sellers, they were also guilty of “fraudulent purchase”.
A Munich court backed Lieberberg’s claims this week, and served an injunction ordering Ventic to stop the resale of tickets to the German leg of the Depeche Mode tour, which kicks off on 2 Jun (and will be going ahead, the band have just confirmed, even though their London show this Saturday is the latest to be cancelled as a result of frontman Dave Gahan’s severe bout of gastroenteritis).
Welcoming the ruling, Frankfurt-based Lieberberg told Billboard: “This decision is the first small step toward the long overdue regulation of ticket sales and the restriction of black market trading. Our aim must be to prevent professional ticket auctions and unacceptable commissions that often come to a multiple of the actual price of admission. At stake here is not so much giving the artists a further share, but the protection of ticket buyers against dubious sources and excessive premiums”.
Explaining the law behind the court’s ruling, the legal man at VDKD, a German live music trade body which backed Leiberberg’s lawsuit, Professor Johannes Kreile, is quoted by Billboard thus: “The courts deemed it proven that Smartfox had purchased or arranged for the purchase of tickets for the Depeche Mode tour from official ticket agencies whilst concealing its intention to resell them itself or through third parties. In doing so Smartfox had deliberately obstructed the MLK sales concept in contravention of competition law”.
As much previously reported, the growth of online ticket touting, where individuals and agencies resell tickets for profit via auction websites or bespoke online ticket resale services, has pissed off many in the live music and artist management sectors. They argue resellers profit without making any investment in the artists or events the tickets are for, while music fans have to pay over the odds to get into gigs. Promoters also say that because people are sometimes forced to pay two or three times the face value of tickets for in demand events, they will subsequently go to fewer live music events each month or year, which is bad news for the wider and especially grass roots live music industry.
The UK government has expressed concern about consumers being ripped off by online ticket touts, either by simply being vastly overcharged, or especially when music fans pay for access to major events but then don’t receive any tickets, often because some touts reduce their own financial risk by only buying tickets themselves once they have a guaranteed sale, which can backfire if the tout can’t then buy any tickets either. However, while repeatedly calling on the live sector to protect consumers against more unscrupulous touts, government ministers have been less willing to introduce new laws to regulate the so called secondary ticketing market. Promoters argue that, other than introducing complicated and expensive new ticketing systems, often involving photo ID, there is little they can actually do to combat the rise of ticket touting.
Some promoters have decided to turn a blind eye to secondary ticketing, or to work with one or another secondary ticketing website on an exclusive basis, presumably in return for a cut of any resale commissions, and also in return for certain commitments to safeguard consumers. As previously reported, the UK Concert Promoters Association has also adopted an “if you can’t beat em join em” approach by launching their own resale website, which they say protects the interests of promoters and fans more than any of the commercial ticketing auction services.
Nevertheless, some promoters continue to lobby for government regulation to restrict touting, and those people will be interested in the German court ruling which suggests there might be a way to use contract and competition law to at least restrict the operations of the biggest ticket resellers – though whether UK laws would prove so helpful is debatable. And even if they did, if action had to be taken against ever reseller for every tour, that wouldn’t be an especially practical solution.
