As many of you will have seen, there are a couple of ill informed Scottish MP’s who are attacking “Ticket Touting” again, for all of the wrong reasons. We say “ill informed” as we are aware of the censorship and the cleansing of information given over to these people. Just this morning I responded to this article on the CMU Website: Scottish Politicians try to put Touting Back on the Agenda

On the face of it, the rise of online “Touting” and the lack of regulation seems to be a laudable cause. However, we have serious reservations when only one side of the case is being presented. As we have come to expect from certain corners of the “music industry” and we use the term advisedly as we do know most modern thinking people realise a transparent Music Industry is the way forward.

It was no surprise that my submission was deleted not once, but twice from the contributions box. This was my effort:

10/11/2010 11:34:16#

We, the members of the Association of Secondary Ticket Agents, proposed – in 2008 an “Artists Levy”. We even went so far as to meet several times with the Deutsche Bank who agreed to administer the escrow account for these funds.
It was our wish that a percentage of the uplift of the Secondary Ticket sale go back to the grass roots music industry. I worked extremely hard at this and I had the agreement of the Industry. It infuriates me when Secondasry Ticket agents take the blame when things go wrong because as the principal of this scheme I can say irrevocably that it was the self interest of the Music Managers AND the Promoters Association that caused it to fail.

This was an Industry Idea, it was an Industry initiative and it was the “Primary Agents and Promoters” that engineered it’s failure.

I welcome any questions on this point as my notes and diary, including my emails can be produced should anyone be foolish enough to rebuke this.

G Burns
Chairman.
ASTA

My comments were prompted by this sentence in the article:-

Various efforts to persuade ticket touting websites, which take a commission on each sale, to pay a levy into the live industry failed.

It is quite shameful that the initiative sponsered by the ticketing industry should then be stolen and worse, the true facts be then obscured by an “Industry Leading” publication.

Shame on you!