O2’s Gareth Griffiths has spoken to IQ about the company’s Priority Tickets platform and its quest to clean up secondary ticketing.

The telecoms giant sold 1.4 million tickets in 2023 via the customer reward scheme, which offers members early access to concert tickets up to 48 hours before general sale.

The company has sponsored London’s The O2 since the venue’s 2007 opening, and  also runs the O2 Priority Gig series, featuring intimate one-off shows by acts such as Kylie Minogue, D-Block Europe, Raye, Sam Fender and Girls Aloud. Held across its entire O2 Academy venue network in the UK, tickets are given away for free to O2 and Virgin Media customers via a ballot.

“We’ve had three huge Priority Gigs this year,” says Griffiths, Virgin Media O2’s director, partnerships and sponsorship. “We did Girls Aloud at O2 Shepherd’s Bush Empire, D-Block Europe at Indigo at The O2, and we just had Raye a couple of weeks ago, also at O2 Shepherd’s Bush Empire as well.

“They’re free shows for our customers and demand is huge – they had 110,000 people applying for tickets for the Kylie show last year. We’ve got some fantastic artists coming to us now and asking to be involved, so next year will be our fourth year and they’re going from strength to strength.”

“We say to an artist, ‘Where would you like to play?’ And they’ve got our whole venue estate to choose from”

The series launched in 2021 with a performance by Wizkid at O2 Forum Kentish Town.

“It’s massive artists doing intimate shows at an O2 venue,” adds Griffiths. “We basically say to an artist, ‘Where would you like to play from our 21 venues?’ And they’ve got our whole venue estate right around the country to choose from, so the potential is really exciting.

“We did an incredible show with Sam Fender in Newcastle and with Raye, she said, ‘I used to go to O2 Shepherd’s Bush Empire as a kid. I’m from London and I love that venue,’ so that was her choice.”

Yesterday (16 October), Griffiths spoke as part of a panel discussion in London hosted by O2, which examined the pain points in the secondary ticketing market and explored what government and online businesses can do to protect consumers.

The conversation followed research by O2 and YouGov indicating that ticket touts are costing music fans in the UK an extra £145 million (€174m) a year. Moreover, O2 revealed it had stopped more than 50,000 suspected bots from entering its Priority platform over a six-week period.

“I think it’s an even bigger problem than that YouGov survey highlights,” Griffiths tells IQ. “Only 5% of people said they would buy a ticket from a tout outside a venue, but two-thirds don’t understand what secondary ticketing is, so we’ve got a lot of customers we can help with awareness.

“We are a customer-centric brand, and if our customers have signed up to Priority to get exclusive access to tickets, then they get into a ticketing journey where there is 30,000 bots in front of them, that’s just not fair. So genuine fans are missing out and this is why we’ve been on a mission to try and sort it out.”

“Money is being taken out of the whole live ecosystem by touts. People won’t spend as much on merch or F&B because they’ve spent all their money on a ticket”

He continues: “We’re also huge supporters of artists and venues in this country. We’ve got 21 O2 venues – 20 O2 Academies and The O2 –  and have invested massively. But money is being taken out of the whole live ecosystem by touts: people won’t spend as much on merch or F&B when they go, because they’ve spent all their money on a ticket.”

Prime Minister Keir Starmer included a pledge to introduce new legislation to cap ticket resale as part of the Labour manifesto, with new the UK government currently preparing to launch a consultation into the secondary ticketing market. A debate is also due to take place in Westminster Hall next week.

“To get something in the manifesto is a huge deal for us because that’s the first time actually we’ve had any political support on it really. That’s a huge sign of positive intent,” adds Griffiths. “The Labour government has just got in and has a whole basket of stuff to get through first, but we are hoping that mid-term – in a couple of years time – there will be legislation, but it won’t stop there for us.”

As well as new laws to protect fans against profiteering, O2 is also calling for clearer information to be presented during the sale process on secondary ticketing platforms, plus clearer identification of resale sites on search engines.

“Hopefully legislation will happen. There’s a way to go on that, and we’ll keep the pressure on, but the other two areas are key for us as well,” concludes Griffiths. “It’s about making our customers aware – and then they can make an informed decision. What they want to do is up to them, but at least we’ll have made them aware and are trying to do right by our customers.”

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The battle against industrial-scale ticket touting in the UK came under the spotlight once more in a panel discussion in London hosted by O2.

The conversation, which featured Virgin Media O2’s Gareth Griffiths, FanFair Alliance campaign manager Adam Webb and Labour MP Sharon Hodgson, chair of the APPG on ticket abuse, examined the pain points in the secondary ticketing market and explored what government and online businesses can do to protect consumers.

Presented by broadcaster Sinead Garvan, it followed research by O2 and YouGov, which indicated that ticket touts are costing music fans in the UK an extra £145 million (€174m) a year.

“Ticketing is a massive part of what we do,” explained Griffiths, director, partnerships and sponsorship at Virgin Media O2. “We sold 1.4m Priority Tickets last year, so this is a really big deal for us. We see our customers having a very hard time trying to buy tickets within the secondary market. It’s massively relevant to the core of our business, and we just want to make sure our customers get a fair deal.”

Based on a online survey of 2,044 adults, the data also revealed that approximately one in five tickets end up on a resale platform, while almost half (48%) of music fans who have attended live music events found it difficult to identify a secondary ticketing site.

O2’s UK venue sponsorship portfolio includes The O2 and 20 O2 Academy venues across the country. O2 stopped more than 50,000 suspected bots from entering its Priority customer reward platform over a six-week period, and Griffiths observed that touting had become “more technically advanced” since the pandemic.

“Now we’ve got a Labour government, we’re going to do something about it”

“We see presales all the time where you see 50-60,000 people in the waiting room for a really hot show, and you know that two-thirds of those are probably bots,” he said. “The real challenge for us now is fighting technology with technology, and we’re really looking into that in terms of the way our ticketing platform works, in terms of where our mobile business works, but it’s ramped up massively off the back of the shows coming back from Covid.”

Hodgson, who has campaigned against abuses in the market for more than a decade, said she was not surprised by the findings.

“I think they’re the tip of the iceberg,” she said. “I think it’s a lot more than £145 million if we were able to properly quantify it, and the lack of awareness didn’t surprise me either.

“The Metropolitan Police had an operation called Operation Podium to ensure that the Olympic tickets weren’t totally abused. They wrote a report afterwards, and basically said secondary ticketing and ticketing in general in this country was rife with criminality, organised crime and money laundering. And we’ve known that since 2012 and here we are, 12 years later, and thankfully, now we’ve got a Labour government, we’re going to do something about it.”

Prime Minister Keir Starmer has pledged to introduce new legislation to cap ticket resale, with the UK government preparing to launch a consultation into the secondary ticketing market. Hodgson offered an update on the likely timescale involved in terms of reform.

“Well, this parliament definitely, so that’s a long timescale,” she said. “There wasn’t a Bill in this King’s Speech… so it’s not going to be within the next year or so. Hopefully the consultation will happen over the next year, and then there’ll be a Bill brought forward in the next King’s Speech, so mid-term this parliament. I can’t wait.”

“The only two Oasis shows that weren’t listed on the secondaries were the two shows at Croke Park in Ireland… Legislation is a key part of solving this”

Webb discussed the lessons that could be learned from regulation introduced in other countries, such as Ireland, France and Australia.

“In Ireland, there was a Sale of Tickets Act introduced in 2021 basically outlawing resale,” he said. “The only two Oasis shows that weren’t listed on the secondaries were the two shows at Croke Park in Ireland. So it’s not the total solution, but you can see that legislation is a key part of solving this.

“The good thing now is that we’ve got the opportunity in the UK to look around the world, and actually design something better.”

Hodgson praised the anti-touting efforts of artists such as Ed Sheeran, Mumford & Sons, Iron Maiden and Arctic Monkeys.

“Right from the start, they could see this was so unfair and didn’t want their fans being ripped off,” she said. “What is the true price, the fair price, the market price [of a ticket]? It should be the price that the artists with their management have decided is the price they want their fans to pay.”

“You’re never going to completely eradicate ticket touting, but you can minimise it”

Nevertheless, she noted that, unlike Sheeran, Taylor Swift’s team had not followed through on their threat to cancel tickets bought via non-official resale sites for her Eras Tour.

“The first concert in Edinburgh, we were waiting with bated breath, what’s she going to do?” said Hodgson. “And she didn’t cancel the tickets, because maybe her fans are so much younger… She was trying to protect her tickets, but when it came down to it, she wasn’t prepared to break the hearts of thousands.”

The influence of search engines in facilitating resale was also brought up. Viagogo was banned from advertising on Google globally in July 2019 after the latter came under fire from lawmakers for allegedly accepting advertising money from sites listing tickets fraudulently, but the ban was quietly lifted four months later.

“It’s been a bit of a journey with Google in that they’ve been receptive at certain points,” said Webb. “For three months, Google removed them from their advertising networks and in that period their traffic absolutely flatlined… If you take either the touts away or you take Google away, there’s no business.”

He added: “I’m pretty glass half full. The frustrating thing for me is that I don’t think it’s that hard to sort out. I think legislation is key to get Google to do the right thing. And again, clearly they need legislation for their lawyers to understand this, and then for the industry to make it easier to resell the ticket.

“You’re never going to completely eradicate ticket touting, but you can minimise it and reduce it to a level. And again, the music industry has been here before with things like piracy for the recorded sector, which was completely out of control. And now, obviously, you’ve got streaming services and a very buoyant recorded market. It’s a similar journey, I think.”

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