GLASTO COPIES RADIOHEAD TICKET TACTICS

Organiser promises Internet touts won't get into festival...

GLASTONBURY organiser MICHAEL EAVIS says he is going to follow RADIOHEAD‘s lead and withhold tickets for his festival from opportunists attempting to sell them illegally on Internet auction sites.

All 112,000 tickets for the June event were snapped up with 23 hours of going on sale last Monday (March 31). Almost immediately, they started to appear on ebay retailing for at least £450 a pair – more than twice the £105 face value.

Eavis said that after reading in the NME how Radiohead plan to prevent would-be touts using ebay to sell-on tickets for their UK tour, he would copy the template.

Advertisement

“It was your story last week,” he told NME. “We’ve already written to the people on ebay and told them they won’t get their tickets. We’ve sent them emails. They know now they won’t get tickets. We do have the list as it comes up on the website. We send them an email and say we’ve seen you on the website, you won’t get your ticket. End of story.”

Eavis also said that he has started a reserve lists of fans seeking tickets. They would be offered the tickets seized from online touts.

“I’ve got someone working on this full time,” he said. “We’ve got to find a way of stopping it so we can get those tickets back and sell them to more deserving people. We’re making a list. We clawed 500 back yesterday alone.”

He also admitted the system was not failsafe and that many people could slip undetected through the net.

One vendor described the means he would employ to sell on his ticket.

“There has been speculation in the news that tickets will only be released two weeks before the festival,” he wrote, “but I have booked with a ticket agency, which allows the delivery address to be changed at any time. This will be changed to your address upon receipt of payment. You will receive the tickets on the morning everyone else does direct from the ticket agency.”

Advertisement

Eavis, who put the demand for tickets down partly to the announcement of REM

and Radiohead as headliners, said that in future he and his army of helpers would either have to vet “all the names individually”, or look at increasing Glastonbury’s capacity.

“The licensing people might let us increase the capacity a little bit, but I don’t want to go through the ceiling,” he said. “Saturation point is probably 200,000, but I can’t really see the authorities agreeing with that sort of figure. We have plenty of land, though. Loads of redundant farmers everywhere at the moment.”

You May Also Like

Advertisement

TRENDING

Advertisement

More Stories