LONDON (CelebrityAccess MediaWire) — Harvey Goldsmith used his keynote address at the In The City conference to fire another salvo at the secondary ticket market and call for increased cooperation between publishers and promoters, Billboard reported.
"Today we live in ticket hell and what concerns me the most today is the fact that the live industry is absolutely thriving," Goldsmith told British artist manager Jonathan Shalit during an interview "The live industry has really jerked itself up and has become predominant globally. But alongside that is baggage, and the baggage is: What is the price of the ticket? What does that ticket mean? Who is dipping into the pot? And how does it work? And I think that we're about to go into a very, very bad cycle, because we've allowed the ticketing industry to become a kind of bunion that sits on your foot and gets bigger and bigger and bigger."
He continued to take online auction sites like eBay and other secondary ticket firms to task, unsurprising in light of his recent scuffle over Led Zep tickets "E-Bay are the biggest tickets touts in the world currently and underneath them is another group of horrible parasites called the secondary market, who go under this banner of being professional and helping the industry, and all they're doing is fucking the industry." he said.
It wasn't all doom and gloom for Goldsmith however. "There is a partnership future that will work," he added "There is room for all the models as long as they don't keep trying to dominate the other and trying to push each other down." – CelebrityAccess Staff Writers
