You Me At Six’s Josh Franceschi calls for ticket tout bots to be made illegal

'Music fans are the only people losing out'

You Me At Six frontman Josh Franceschi has spoken out against ticket tout websites that use bot systems to automatically buy up tickets, calling for them to be made illegal.

The ‘Night People’ and ‘Bite My Tongue’ singer called for a ban on botnets when appearing before the Parliamentary Culture, Media and Sport select committee to question the practices of secondary ticket websites.

“I feel like we made some steps today in a big way and I think there’s a lot of evidence to suggest changes should be made,” he told the BBC. “The main point I wanted to get across is that I want transparency between the consumers and the sellers to live music.”

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READ MORE: You Me At Six – the full NME interview

Franceschi continues: “Ultimately I don’t want to see the industry that I’ve grown up in and love, shy away from making the right decisions for the people who pump money into it and keep it afloat which is the fans of music.

“Right now they seem to be the only people that are losing out in this situation and I wanted to act as a voice for them.”

Rules and regulations around the security and reselling of live music, comedy and sports tickets is currently under review.

“We’re trying to change the legislation to make it illegal for secondary ticket companies to buy, for some shows, thirty per cent of the capacity of the venue and reselling them at a hiked up price,” Josh told NME. “There’s been a growth in that part of the industry of over one billion pounds last year. It is illegal to tout tickets outside a venue but there don’t seem to be many people trying to give it a voice. Last week we had Mumford & Sons get behind us on it, Alt-J, One Direction, all these people were showing their love and support online about it. We managed to get the petition up to 80,000 signatures, so albeit we didn’t get the 100,000 which on paper you need for it to be discussed in parliament, we had some very positive talks last week and I met the Minister For Culture & Performing Arts and they’re behind it.

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“I’ve made a big thing about this tour, I’ve sat down with our promoters and management and told them all the companies that are no longer allowed to sell tickets for You Me At Six. This is about fans of live music and enough’s enough, man, there’s got to be somebody out there representing those people. Hopefully there’s some changes made.”

The band are gearing up to release their fifth album on 13 January 2017.

You Me At Six will tour the UK in April next year.  See dates below.
 
April
3 – Newcastle, O2 Academy
5 – Plymouth, Pavilions
6 – Blackburn, King George’s Hall
7 – Doncaster, The Dome
10 – Birmingham, O2 Academy
11 – Bournemouth, Solent Hall
13 – Glasgow, SECC
14 – Cardiff, Motorpoint Arena
15 – London, Alexandra Palace

 

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