Like thousands of other fans of The Spice Girls across the world, I “queued up” online this morning (very early in my time zone!) and waited patiently for my chance at buying tickets for their next reunion tour in the UK. I waited. And waited. After several minutes, I received an error message that said I needed to try again. I tried the same thing across multiple devices (phone, tablet, laptop) with the same result.

After a few minutes of this, I got curious and looked at the reseller sites StubHub and Viagogo. Almost immediately there were tickets being listed for all of TSG new tour dates, at a markup of at *least* triple the face value of the tickets. Now, less than 24 hours, most of these tickets are being advertised on reseller sites for thousands of dollars, well over 10 TIMES the cost of the same tickets many of us tried to purchase a few hours ago.

What’s happened today is not unique, not new, and unfortunately it’s part a larger problem facing the music touring industry— loads of tickets are snatched up by third party resellers at the same time devoted fans are trying to purchase the exact same tickets. Is this just a byproduct of capitalism? Are these resellers simply trying to run an honest business? Perhaps. But at what point does the business itself become anti-consumer, by allowing these third parties to snatch up most of the ticket inventory, and list it for resale at an astounding price in *mere minutes* after the tickets go on sale?

The stadium venues and musical artists make the same amount of money. Ticketmaster and other primary sales websites make the same amount as well (though the connection to resellers is questionable). Do you think it’s right that the end consumers— the FANS— are the ones forced to pay much more than face value for the same tickets?

Lets ask The Spice Girls, their management team, the touring company and the management of Ticketmaster & AXS to work on a solution to this problem: treat consumers/music fans with more respect, and give them a reasonable chance to purchase tickets at the original advertised price. Nobody should have to pay double, triple, ten times the cost of face value simply because a large ticket reseller was for there first— and only because they have massive resources employed across the globe to buy up as many tickets as possible a fast as they can.

These resellers buy first, and rip off fans later. In this case, “later” is just a few minutes after the tickets went on sale.

As for me: I’ve been lucky to have seen The Spice Girls live three times already on their previous world tours. So, I’m not complaining simply because the tickets I wanted this time were “sold out.” Many other fans experienced similar situations today. Many were lucky to get their tickets before the resellers did.

Here are some informative articles about this problem:

https://invitemanager.com/7-ways-ticket-brokers-get-tickets-and-why-you-have-no-chance/​

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/mgxqb8/the-man-who-broke-ticketmaster​

https://www.cnet.com/news/how-the-ticketing-world-is-taking-on-scalpers-and-bots/