Why is everything so dodgy?
We were considering selling certain types of market information on E-Bay although the legalities are probably too daunting.
Having experienced the platform for the first time over this past week, we are surprised by the potential for market abuse in any blind auction bidding process on the site.
In this post, as usual, we'll give you the narrative, describe the scam, demonstrate the universality of the abusive structure, mock the perpetrators, and offer a solution.
We'll also point you in the direction of some proper music.
Where else could you gain such joy and happiness?
Right.
The Temper Trap are a remarkable band.
Having spent over a decade in the music industry (from van driving to running a large independent label), I tend to keep away from the industry nowadays.
Too many egotistical narcissistic types for my liking.
But The Temper Trap are different and in celebration of ##########################
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As neither the venue nor the associated ticket agencies functioned in an adequate manner, the gig sold out without me getting my hands on any tickets, and hence the revelation of E-Bay.
Now, one of the primary ways to make money in any market is to create scarcity when you possess the assets that are so prized.
So Robin### of Cheshire decides to buy up four spare tickets and to auction these tickets on E-Bay.
Robin### tells us that he is a big fan of the band and is going to the gig himself, and he even tells us that the new album will be out in the New Year.
Robin### might think he is a fan.
But Robin### is, in Reality, a Snivelling Little Shit from Sale (SLSS).
He is exploiting both the band and the venue, and all auctionees.
Firstly, our SLSS puts two tickets on E-Bay, not at cost or even just a little above cost, you understand, but as a blind auction.
Individuals desperate for tickets started bidding and 2 x £7.50 tickets eventually went for £82.
Having pocketed his £67 profit, our SLSS then put two more tickets on the platform, for sale directly at £85 (he was eventually forced to sell for £80), to increase his eventual profit to £132.
By gaming the process in this manner, Robin### maximised the returns that he would receive in the blind auction - if he had put all four tickets up at the same time, for example, he would have reduced the scarcity factor and, hence, his touted winnings.
And that is what this is - touting, legalised touting.
I was astonished how many of the abusive templates utilised by bookmakers to fleece punters are also to be found on E-Bay.
Firstly, it is a sellers' market.
Doubly so in auctions.
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Thirdly, due to the truncated structure in markets for concert tickets, the same psychological devices may be used by both the platform and sellers to induce desire in the buyer - the E-Bay prompts telling you that you are currently winning the bid but shouldn't you increase the maximum that you are willing to pay in case somebody trumps you are a primary example of this.
It would be more truthful if they were to inform us that we should increase our bid so as to increase the returns to E-Bay's shareholders.
Really...
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Now, people who make their living out of E-Bay auctions will say that this is all just reasonable capitalism, buyer beware and all that.
Not so.
A straight sale of an item on E-Bay is fine and dandy, but a blind auction is a structure deliberately created to exploit the buyer.
That is why Richard Scudamore and the Premier League utilise exactly the same template in the selling of tv rights to the spectacle formerly known as football.
Blind auctions maximise revenue for the seller.
Our Snivelling Little Shit from Sale should be aware that it ain't so cool enhancing your bank balance in this way.
And it undermines the event.
Just as the pricing and reselling of Premier League match/season tickets has resulted in the elimination of atmosphere at most grounds as the new bums-on-seats simply do not know what to do, so it is with gigs.
There must have been large numbers of Real fans of The Temper Trap who were unable to afford the £40+ per head that the likes of SLSS were screwing out of them.
Meanwhile, Ian and Stephanie from Didsbury or a bunch of private income students from the South East were able to dip into their assets in order to see the gig.
The outcome was not difficult to predict.
Despite a totally exhilarating performance by the band, there was a whole bunch of Cheshites who thought that the collective sounds of their shrill voices were more palatable than the "Science Of Fear".
A poor call and then some...
It cannot be easy playing to a bunch of middle class tossers - ask Emmanuel Adebayor!
As ever, we have a solution.
Unless blind auctions are banned then, in the case of concert tickets, a 'tax' should be placed on both E-Bay and the seller so that the money is redistributed to where it warrants being - in the hands of the very excellent musicians who created the event.
Because it is the band that is getting ripped off the most.
If I hadn't paid £42 for my three tickets, two of us could have also purchased The Temper Trap album "Conditions", or a few t-shirts, or merely thrown money at the stage in a Georgian Jewish stylee...
...instead of fuelling the already rampant flow of money from Manchester to Cheshite.
The Temper Trap (http://www.thetempertrap.net/Home/) will be colossal - Soul, some Split Enz, Gospel, some Steely Dan and Fine Young Cannibals, Very Very Tight Band, Great Melodies, Structurally and Dynamically Creative, with top management, Korda Marshall.
And Dougie has the most inspirational and beautiful voice.
Despite the E-Bay Experience, the evening would have had to have counted as a total success, if it had not been for some scruffy Manc eejit pointing at me in the bogs and nasaling: "Eayyy, look. It's Mick McCarffeeeee..."
Runt.
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