The Italian job: the Government is trying to ban secondary ticketing after tv report

The Italian job: the Government is trying to ban secondary ticketing after tv report

The secondary ticketing market in Italy is under attack and the Government is reportedly trying to set new rules to ban the phenomenon. The sparkle which started the fire was an undercover report on the TV show "Le Iene", in which an anonymous employee explained how tickets made their way onto such sites.

Live Nation's Italian MD Roberto de Luca also appeared in the same show and admitted the company had placed tickets directly onto the secondary market for shows it had promoted - during an interview with reporter Matteo Viviani. Basically he admitted that Live Nation had a direct relationship with secondary ticketing platforms that involves certain companies receiving an amount of tickets from Live Nation specifically to be sold at an inflated price.

After initially denying the allegations, de Luca admitted the practice, stating:

I want to be clear that, to your question if Live Nation issued tickets on secondary sites and I answered no… in fact we issue some tickets, a very limited number of tickets on other sites, in this case Viagogo. But I must make clear that Live Nation sells around 2 million tickets every year and the tickets that we issue on the secondary sites are equal to 0.20% of our tickets sales. We are not talking about tens of thousands of tickets, but hundreds of tickets for a concert.

Since the programme was aired, several hight profile Italian artists have distanced themselves from Live Nation - among them there is the rocker Vasco Rossi, a fave of the Italian audience, who cut his ties with the company.

Italian consumer organisation Codacons has also submitted a complaint to the public prosecutor of Milan against Live Nation Italy. Codacons president Marco Maria Donzelli said:

This is a necessary step to start up investigations concerning Live Nation… And if this gets to a court case, all those who have bought tickets for concerts on secondary ticket sites and at inflated prices will be able to seek action to be compensated for the damages they have suffered.

Politicians have also tabled an amendment to Italy's budget law, which would curb the activities of secondary ticketing websites. Culture minister Dario Franceschini said in a statement that the practice is "an intolerable phenomenon and recent events show that self-regulation is not enough". And, on Friday (November 11), Italian officials presented an amendment to the budget law that would address the secondary ticketing issue in the country.
The new law aims to forbid "the activity of selling on tickets by persons other than concert organisers or those authorised" to create automatic ticket offices. The government takes issue with "the placing of large numbers of concert tickets on secondary platforms which are then sold at greatly inflated prices".

Assomusica, the association of Italian promoters, has pledged its support to Franceschini’s proposal. The group’s president Vincenzo Spera, commented:

I acknowledge with great satisfaction that this afternoon Minister Franceschini announced that he will submit an amendment to the budget law to limit and counter the phenomenon of online ticket touting, or secondary ticketing.

In the meantime Live Nation issued a statement saying:

Live Nation Italy would like to make it clear that the allegations in Le Iene relate to a small number of tickets for a handful of international artists. Live Nation Italy has never been asked to list any tickets on secondary markets by Italian artists.

As BBC reports, in the UK, the FanFair Alliance (which lobbies on behalf of artists for stronger regulation of the market) urged British politicians to take note of Italy's stance;

The situation in Italy has become a national scandal, and it appears the Italian government is now prepared to take action to protect fans and recalibrate the market. That's to be applauded and... you can only hope that UK politicians are taking note. We feel the UK's ticket resale market is similarly out of control and will be repeating our call for the urgent enforcement of existing consumer law to flush out such bad practice and make ticket resale far more transparent, as well as measures to disarm and disrupt the online touts.