Tag: The Police

You might remember me talking about how the massive rort that was The Police ticket auction. The end of the Melbourne auction yesterday proved there are some Police fans with very deep pockets.

According to the Herald Sun, punters have paid up to $1600 for a pair of front row seats, a significant mark-up on their $1000 value.

So did the auction discourage scalpers as hoped? Not a chance. Ebay’s still flooded with tickets from all around the MCG, including plenty of seats within the first few rows.

To be fair, a significant number of these tickets are being sold at their face value. Still, there are plenty of people out there looking to make a profit on the show. One scalper is asking $1000 for two sixth row tickets, which originally cost $250 a piece. The sad thing is, he’s likely to find a buyer too.

So, apparently these official auctions aren’t the way to prevent scalping. Even though I’m not at all surprised, it got me thinking: what would stop the fans getting ripped off?

I’d hate for us to get to the point where we needed to show ID when presenting tickets. That’d penalise the people who can’t attend a show and hope to simply recoup their money. But is this the only way to prevent scalping? I’d love to hear your views!

Image source: Isuperwang @ Flickr 

Fans still reeling over the ticket prices announced for The Police’s Australian tour have one more reason to be disgruntled. The band has elected to auction selected seats in the first five rows of the Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth.

The practice of auctioning premium seats is new for Australia, but has been around in the United States since 2003. Tickets typically sell at an average of 74% higher than their face value.

Where does the extra money go, you ask? Not to the ticket retailer, but straight to the pockets of Sting and his cohorts. Auctioned tickets from the band’s American shows had a “charity component,” but no one’s exactly sure how large that is.

Supporters of the practice say it helps to boycott scalping by allowing fans to buy tickets at their “real value.” Yet this claim is dubious, as the starting bid of these tickets is the face-value of a non-auctioned tickets. Perhaps front row tickets at The Police were never really worth $250 to begin with, after all.

I’m with the large proportion of fans who are against this idea, as it seems to reward punters with the deepest pockets rather than the deepest passion for the band.

Call me old fashioned, but I miss the “good old days,” where I’d queue overnight with other enthusiastic fans in hopes of getting that elusive front row. We’d be cold, sometimes wet, definitely hungry, hoping that a radio breakfast show would take pity on us and bring food. But we’d bond over those hours and all feel satisfied in the end that we’d earned those tickets.

On the advent of internet ticketing, it became preferable to sit there at your computer screen hitting “refresh” as you watched the minutes tick on to the sale time. The camaraderie was gone, but that familiar adrenalin rush was still there.

It’s the fans with that passion who deserve to see The Police up close and personal. Not the people who can simply afford the privilege.

If you’re so inclined, you can bid on Police tickets from July 23 until August 2 through Ticketmaster.

Image source: Lionel Urman @ Wikimedia Commons