Free BBC tickets on eBay for £400
Published May 12th, 2007
That’s for a pair of tickets up for auction on Ebay for admission to a free BBC Radio 1 concert in England featuring Scissor Sisters, Kasabian and Razorlight, among others.
More than half-a-million listeners asked for one of the 35,000 free tickets for Radio 1’s Big Weekend, slated for May 19 and 20 in Preston, Lancashire, and the eBay items have upset both the Beeb and minister of creative industries Shaun Woodward.
Woodward says the sale of the tickets, funded by the licence fee payer, is “unacceptable,” says the Financial Times, going on:
“The artists are not making any money, why should the touts?” – asked Woodward, whose department, “had been trying to encourage alternative ways to distribute event tickets in an effort to stop ticket touts from ripping off consumers”.
However, “Ebay has said that the auction of the tickets will continue, and it is a matter between the promoter or organiser of the event and the ticket holder,” says the FT
