UPDATE: Viagogo Responds After Australian Musicians Campaign To Have The Company Banned
ORIGINAL STORY: Viagogo has been a hot-buttoned issue among the Australian music community recently, with artists, venues and other big names in the industry taking a stand against the website and the ticket scalpers who use it.
Amy Shark, who recently cleaned up at the ARIAs, has joined the campaign against Viagogo by taking to Twitter and directly calling them out for facilitating ticket sales to her tour next year at stupidly inflated ticketing prices.
https://twitter.com/AmySharkMusic/status/1068453970769637376
“…don’t take the risk of buying tickets from companies like Viagogo,” Shark wrote.
“They’re selling tickets to my tour for $600 and there’s no guarantee they’re real. It hurts you and it hurts the artists you’re going to see.”
This comes after acts like Gang Of Youths and Tash Sultana, and festivals like Laneway, directly called out Viagogo for allowing ticket scalping to happen. They had asked fans to email their negative experiences with Viagogo to stopviagogo@lunaticnentertainment.com with the intention of sending it to the Labor party in hopes of getting it shut down.
Shark has just announced her largest local headline shows to date, taking place in May next year.
UPDATE: In a statement to Music Feeds, Viagogo said:
“Viagogo is a marketplace and doesn’t buy or sell tickets. Viagogo provides a platform for third party sellers to sell tickets to event goers. Viagogo does not set ticket prices, sellers set their own prices, which may be above or below the original face value. The tickets sold on Viagogo’s platform are genuine tickets that have been sold on by the original ticket purchaser in good faith.”
