Head to come

Here is an all-too typical case study. On February 2, at 10am, tickets went on sale online for the July concert at Glasgow’s Barrowland of the US indie band The Gaslight Anthem. The gig promoter is DF Concerts, whose principal, Geoff Ellis, is the man behind T in the Park and now TRNSMT. The ticket sales were through Ticketmaster.

Seconds after the online sale opened hundreds of disappointed punters were told that all the tickets were sold out. Seconds after that again secondary ticket sites Seatwave and Getmein! (platforms which enable the buying and selling of tickets) were marketing the £37.50 briefs for three times the price.

So, a classic example of the market operating? Or an effective monopoly which exploits the customer? Because all of the parties involved here are essentially the same one. DF Concerts is majority-owned by Live Nation which owns – or merged with if you prefer – Ticketmaster in 2010. And Ticketmaster is Seatwave and Getmein! in a mask.

The Competition and Markets Authority is meant to act against anti-competitive practices. It allowed Ticketmaster to buy Seatwave, reasoning that there was sufficient competition in the secondary market from Viagogo and the eBay-owned Stubhub.

It’s predecessor, the Competitions Commission (and Office of Fair Trading) initially decided that the merger between Live Nation and Ticketmaster wasn’t in the public interest but then, in 2009, performed a volte face after appeals from the two companies and decided to nod it through.

The Diary asked its successor, the CMA, how the Gaslight Anthem example could be allowed. A spokesperson responded: “Our absolute priority has been to secure improvements as rapidly as possible for people using secondary ticketing sites. Our enforcement work, using consumer protection law, has seen three of the largest sites pledge to provide their customers with better information about the tickets being sold so they can decide whether it’s worth buying them from the secondary market in the first place. The Government has also passed a new law to tackle automated bots buying up tickets in bulk as soon as they are released.”

Live Nation is far and away the world’s biggest concert promoter – putting on every act you’ve ever heard of, from Rihanna, Madonna to U2, and not just music – grossing more than $30 billion last year, with almost all tickets going through Ticketmaster.

Ticketmaster denies that it ever holds back tickets to put onto secondary sites and also never places them on the secondary market.

In 2009, when the merger of the two companies was proposed, Bruce Springsteen (from New Jersey, like the Anthem) said: “The one thing that would make the current situation even worse for the fan than it is now would be Ticketmaster and Live Nation coming up with a single system, thereby returning us to a near monopoly situation in music ticketing.”

Not even the Boss could bring down the curtain.

SEMMIT’S UP

Michael Martin, the former Labour MP for Springburn and then Speaker of the House of Commons, died last week. Among the many obituaries there was no mention of what was either his phobia of gadgets or, alternatively, a rather old-fashioned view of women. I can’t say I knew him well but I do know that as an MP he packed his dirty washing into large envelopes and sent these back home to his wife Mary, courtesy of the parliamentary post.

ALPACALYPSE NOW

If you were walking past Glasgow Caledonian University last Tuesday and saw a strange hairy beast with four legs coming towards you be reassured, it wasn’t a student crawling home on all fours after a session in the union…well probably not…it was an alpaca. Caley introduced them, not to butcher for the canteen – although the meat is apparently lean and high in protein – or to spin the wool (its hypoallergenic), but to de-stress the poor suffering students before exams. Really. Hundreds turned up to cuddle them, look into their eyes, have selfies taken with them, and dodge their gobbing (is the collective noun for a group of alpacas a spittoon?). And, yes, your taxes are probably paying for it. I also hear that an entrepreneurial graduate student, sparked by the event, has submitted a grant application for further study on the calming nature of the beast entitled Embracing the Alpacalypse.

A PUN MY WORD

Spotting the title above a shop name in Saracen Street in Glasgow reminded me how much local business folk love a pun. The name? Florist Gump. I used to keep a list of them. There was Curl Up ‘N’ Dye, I recall. Sofa King Cheap (say it quickly). Wean’s World (a clothes emporium), Sellfridges (I don’t think the London place has yet accused them of passing off), the dog walkers Bark Life, the Kitsch Inn, Get Stuffed, the Fish Plaice, Salted and Battered, the garden maintenance firm Mow’s Art and the Chinese takeaway Prince Chow Mein. I may have misremembered one or two of them or, again, I could have anticipated the future.

HARLEY MATTERS

He’s almost certainly the most famous Scottish footballer you’ve never heard of. Alex Harley played for Third Lanark, in their most famous season in the Scottish First Division, 1960-61, hitting 42 goals, easily the country’s top scorer. The Hi-Hi were unstoppable going forward but wayward and ungovernable at the back. They scored 100 goals - reaching that by beating Hibs on the last day of the season 6-1- but conceded 80, finishing third (apt) behind Rangers and Kilmarnock.

In the close season Harley was transferred, for £14,500, to the then struggling Manchester City. He rammed in 32 goals, scoring the winner in the derby against United, while the rest of his teammates could only contribute 39 in total. City were relegated.

At the season’s end he was transferred to Birmingham City for £42,000, where it all started to go wrong. He subsequently played briefly for Dundee and then Portadown. He died in Birmingham in 1969, uncapped for Scotland, and at the heartbreakingly young age of 33. By then Third Lanark, too, had died.

If anyone knew Alex, or played with him, please get in touch with the Diary.