Soundwave Festival Tickets – The Scalping Begins

It’s now become the dark side of every festival: scalping. For every concert announced, every festival lineup dropped and every tour played, there is always a small group of dickheads who believe it is a fantastic idea to steal tickets away from genuine fans, and stick them online for people to purchase and exuberant prices. And with the announcement of what is possibly the biggest lineup ever to hit this country, the scalpers have gone absolutely mental.

Tickets for the 10th anniversary of what is now an internationally recognised festival, went on sale this morning at 9am. Having already sold 85% of tickets in the pre-sale, it was obvious that it would be a bloodbath in the race to get tickets, with many fans ending up disappointed. Currently, both Melbourne and Brisbane have sold out, the remaining cities are expected to go within the next hour.

With the fans absolutely gutted that they missed out on tickets, they will have to contemplate blowing in excess of $400 to catch the likes of Metallica, Blink 182, A Perfect Circle and Slayer. The list of scalped tickets is rapidly growing, as the lowlifes who justify such activity as being ‘economically viable’ and ‘a means to an end’ deprive a small group of fans that opportunity to see their favourite acts.

When One Direction previously toured Australia for their strictly limited shows, tickets that had been purchased for around $90 were being flogged for the cool price of $2000. Although I’m not a fan of the British boy band, that’s bullshit, regardless of who is playing. That’s just not on. Although many do not approve of their manufactured music, it is still clear that many sought to exploit the fans’ need to see the X Factor dream team.

Thankfully, there is a movement from both festivals and touring agencies to fight these idiots. In a feature article published by the folks over at FasterLouder, one of the head honchos at the wonderful people at Chugg Entertainment outlined their strive to fight scalping. He stated that Chugg, in regards to the November Radiohead tour, was “limiting transactions to four tickets per person; having ticketing agencies manually scan for multiple purchases using one or a combination of the same account numbers, account names, and credit cards; having ticketing agencies monitor IP addresses during the on-sale to see if there are multiple transactions processing from the same address; and – for the Radiohead tour specifically – we enforced a delay on ticket delivery until closer to the concert date as a deterrent for patrons looking to buy from scalpers.”

The feature continues to raise seriously good points regarding the scalping issues, a recommended read for all music fans. Although it is seriously unfortunate for those of you missed out on tickets to the 2013 Soundwave Festival, there are always sideshows. Small amounts of tickets are left, but they won’t be there for long, so get in quickly before the scalpers scoop them up!

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