Urban_Tribesman said:

Ultrauk said:

Looks like gallery standing tickets at the top have now been put onsale via RAH website

You need a good head for heights up there.

I'm feeling sick already!! LOL

Urban_Tribesman said:

I had a look on some sites today at the tix already on sale by touts/greedy bastards that think an artists concert is a legitimate excuse for them to make some cash (artiste and venue aside of course). Seats in the front 4 rows, £250, circle tickets £125.
Sickening. It should be stopped as that is why we find it so hard and so stressful to get tickets and it's always a scramble. It's not as though the artiste is getting this money, just some .... I'm lost for a word but I have a C in my mind for some reason.
Those 4 circle tickets I ended up with? Available at what they cost if anyone is interested or gets desperate. I may even give a couple away nearer the time if I still have them and I feel so inclined.

Urban_Tribesman said:

I had a look on some sites today at the tix already on sale by touts/greedy bastards that think an artists concert is a legitimate excuse for them to make some cash (artiste and venue aside of course). Seats in the front 4 rows, £250, circle tickets £125.
Sickening. It should be stopped as that is why we find it so hard and so stressful to get tickets and it's always a scramble. It's not as though the artiste is getting this money, just some .... I'm lost for a word but I have a C in my mind for some reason.
Those 4 circle tickets I ended up with? Available at what they cost if anyone is interested or gets desperate. I may even give a couple away nearer the time if I still have them and I feel so inclined.

#Parasites

I totally agree with you. Websites like viagogo should be shut down. Did you see the documentary on them? Sumbags! The UK programme named & shamed them & they moved offices to the Netherlands after it. I remember seeing it with a Will Young fan wanting a tkt for Glasgow gig on day of sale queuing up at 9am & found that that viagogo & other sites had got deals in advance of fans.

John_The_Flower_Man said:

I opened up multiple Google pages on my PC at work so I could dash back and forth between Ticketmaster (or perhaps that should be Toutmaster!), Gigsandtours, See Tickets, Stargreen and the RAH itself. Boy, did things happen fast at 9AM! As everybody has noted all the half-decent tickets disappeared instantly. Thankfully I was able to secure an Arena B ticket through Stargreen - who I've purchased from many times over the years and have generally found to be a pretty good company to deal with. It's an improvement over the Stalls L ticket I picked up in the fan pre-sale. And a quid cheaper into the bargain. Does rather make a bit of a nonsense of the whole pre-sale thing. Having said that, I got the very first stalls ticket, A1, for last November's Apollo gig on the fan pre-sale. Perhaps it was just my lucky day.

I'm too much of a gentleman to put into words my opinion of the thieving vermin who buy up all the tickets and then try and fleece real fans - but surely something has got to be done about this insane, downright criminal situation. It's got completely out of hand. I just hope people hold back from paying way over the odds for tickets from these rob-dogs (not easy if you're really desperate to go) so that they either get lumbered with them or are forced to sell them at face value closer to the date.      

We all think it John, but somehow, it just seems to continue. A shame and a blight on going to any big gig these days.

Touts just do demand and supply. When ive bought from them it didnt affect my behaviour at a gig. I was still attentive ;)

I honestly hadn't thought about them at the time of posting, rewak, but I could deffo make the time for a special Ten  Minute Hate.

Looking back I think I was trying to roll up into one neat but loathsome package two aspects of going to gigs that bug me the most: touts and badly behaved gig goers. Now I think this is stretching a bit - ok, a lot  - but for so many of the BBGGs I've had the misfortune to be near and had no choice but to listen to yakking away, the gig comes over as just another positional good, something to be seen at, to post to social media, to have bragging rights about: for all they know about the musicians or the music, it could be Pinky and Perky up on the stage. Or the new cool design of jeans.

Now, on one level, if this means a large arena sells out and money goes to the artist: that's a good thing, obviously, because there are few things in life that reliably give as much pleasure as taking money off snobby idiots for a good cause :)

.. but on another, it does risk other fans - old or new, but genuinely into music - being pushed out. And I can't reconcile myself to touts or reselling companies parasiting off fans and the bands. Is there a solution? I don't know.

Like i said in the Greenwich thread security should be allowed to use cattle prods on the kind of people who treat shows as clubs.

Appy61 said:

We, the fans, could always tell the ignoramuses to sit down and shut up! There must be enough of us to do this? 

As for the touts the only way is not to use them, unfortunetely this may be detrimental to the band and/or us when the gigs aren't viable due to lack of ticket sales. A difficult conundrum.

What, you mean a lack of tickets caused by them being all bought up by the touts/grubby resellers which causes real fans to buy from these sources at inflated prices because they are not available because they were all bought at the start by....... You get my drift.
It's a shit system and something needs to be done.