It was reported this week that our friends over at Fanfair Alliance, a campaign group backed by Ed Sheeran, PJ Harvey and Arctic Monkeys, have warned that music fans will continue to face “rampant” ripoffs by touts on resale sites, after ministers rejected plans to clean up the sector.

Since 2016, Fanfair have helped deliver major reforms to the secondary ticketing market, offering advice to artists, promotors and fans alike to combat ticket touting. 

The Department for Business and Trade opted not to undertake proposals from the competition watchdog that were created to make life harder for these professional touts, who profit directly off of music fans. One of the measures that was suggested included moves towards preventing so called bulk-buying in which touts purchase large quantities of tickets, thus reducing supply from the pockets of actual music fans. There were also calls to see the end of “speculative selling”, a process in which touts list seats they don’t actually have, sell them and then hope to secure a ticket closer to the event date. Often they don’t source the ticket and leave their buyers out of pocket.

Read more about the full report here.