It will never happen, the venues are not set up to sell tickets they way the big firms are, it takes a big budget to provide phone lines and webservers.

Would have to disagree Graeme, just about every concert venue I've been to has a box-office.

I tried to buy tickets to go see Flight of the Conchords a while back now, on a number of occasions from Ticketmaster. They went on sale on a Friday morning at 9am so I was on the website then but I couldn't even get through as I had been "blocked" from buying a ticket. Within about half an hour the event had sold out but tickets were available on Ticketmaster's sister site Get Me In for well over double the price.

The following week an extra date was added and the same happened again, I was blocked from buying. In the end I bought tickets from Ebay at nearly double the price, but this has happened to me on a number of occasions and as a result I now refuse to buy tickets from Ticketmaster.

And the vast majority of tickets are bought online now, you'll not change that and venues are not equipped nor staffed, to cope with long queues selling thousands of tickets.

I rarely go to concerts, but I tried to buy tickets for blink 182 last year on ticketmaster, Was a member of the official blink 182 website which gave me a chance to get pre sale tickets. Logged in with time to spare, they'd all gone in minutes, I Had no luck at all. So I tried the o2 pre sale thing, where again I didn't stand a chance, so then tried with ticket master when they went on general sale. And again the website was useless and I had no luck again. There was nothing I could do, to me it seems to be a case of being lucky enough to get through to the server rather than being online on time... I ended up paying £100 quid on seatwave for a ticket worth £30. and what about the "unfortunate" people who work and cant access the net when tickets go on sale?

Seat wave had hundreds of tickets up for sale for a big profit within an hour of them coming out on general release, touting outside a venue is one thing... but it's getting a bit out of hand when fans who are desperately trying to get tickets can't because of the hundreds of people getting hold of tickets with the sole intention of selling them on at a profit.

I feel like a mug tbh for paying so much, and if desperate people like me decided not to pay extortionate money to these selfish d1cks for tickets then maybe we wouldn't have this issue. But if I wanna go to the concert, i've gotta get one by any means necessary....

I have absolutely no issue with people ending up with spares for face value, and there are a few good people out there who do that. But imo this whole selling for profit thing needs to be stopped.

Likewise, but I can't think of many that don't sell their tickets online through third parties. Even the independents. I can think of several where it's the only option, especially independents.

Yeah I had a similar experience with the Stone Roses gigs.

Logged on well in advance, couldn't get them. Nor could my brother or old man.

10 mins later, lots on Ebay. Genuine fans do miss out.

No they don't, they pay more.
This free enterprise thing is a bit of a bugger isn't it...

Sorry Mr Big Graeme, not everyone is rich man like yourself.

I never pay more that face value (plus fees) EVER.

You after any tickets BTW? Coldplay and Stone Roses are doing quite well at the moment.

How much?

I was really wanting to go last year, now not so bothered.

I'm going to be careful how I phrase this, but recently I was talking to a member of a largely underground but with a good solid following band. They sell out medium sized venues regularly, and do tickets for their gigs. He worked for a company prior to the band taking off who resold tickets. The resellers had a very good inside line to the original sellers of a lot of these tickets. They may possibly have been mentioned in this thread, I couldn't possibly say as I've got the attention span of a hamster.

His band will not work with anyone connected with the company who were the original sellers above as he knows that the whole thing is a scam having seen it first hand. For all the original sellers 'open' appearance, there are (according the him) ways into the OS website that can be exploited for gain.

His argument is that when his band says they want to pitch a ticket at around X amount, they don't expect X amount to be paid by another company just so that their fans can pay 2X to the reseller. He wants their fans to pay X, not a multiple of X.