Sign up for IQ Index
The latest industry news to your inbox.
One Direction were reportedly offered a "seven-figure sum" to back an unnamed ticket resale site, which they "flatly turned down"
By IQ on 01 Aug 2016
Horan, far left, with 1D
image © Disney–ABC Television Group
One Direction turned down an offer of over £1 million to endorse a prominent secondary ticketing website, it has emerged.
“1D got offered a seven-figure sum by a secondary ticketing company to be featured on their site, and a very large share on uplift on those highly-priced tickets,” a “source close to the band” tells the Daily Mirror. “The band flatly turned this down.”
In a statement to the Mirror, band member Niall Horan calls resale sites such as StubHub and Viagogo “terrible for music and for real music fans”, echoing the tone of the language used at the launch earlier this month of anti-touting initiative FanFair Alliance, and says the band “always thought very carefully about how tickets were priced, and so to regularly see fans on Twitter unable to get a ticket or having to pay ridiculous secondary ticketing prices was incredibly frustrating”.
“1D got offered a seven-figure sum by a secondary ticketing company to be featured on their site… The band flatly turned this down”
One Direction previously lent their support to a petition created by Mumford & Sons manager Adam Tudhope which called for the protection of music fans by properly enforcing the 2015 Consumer Rights Act.
Around a month later Professor Michael Waterson, in his review of the British secondary ticketing market, recommended just that – a decision welcomed by Tudhope and others – but disappointed others by failing to call for the criminalisation of ticket touting in the UK.
Even if 1D weren’t so anti-touting, it’s not like they need the money: the band were collectively the second-richest celebrities of 2015, behind only Taylor Swift.
Get more stories like this in your inbox by signing up for IQ Index, IQ’s free email digest of essential live music industry news.