This article first appeared in The Edge Malaysia Weekly on May 29, 2023 - June 4, 2023

Extraordinary demand for Coldplay and Jacky Cheung concert tickets recently provided golden opportunities for scalpers. According to reports, Coldplay tickets were being resold for up to RM43,000, with a fan said to be ready to even shell out RM111,111 for a concert ticket.

The brouhaha over the difficulty in obtaining tickets and the prices demanded by scalpers prompted Communications and Digital Minister Fahmi Fadzil to declare last week that the government is considering introducing anti-ticket scalping legislation.

Currently, Malaysia does not have anti-ticket scalping legislation. A look at jurisdictions like Western Australia shows that ticket scalping laws would prohibit the reselling of tickets for more than 10% of their original price, and penalise those who use bots to purchase tickets. Any advertisement promoting resold tickets must also list the original price, as well as the seat and row number.

While laudable, we should not rush to introduce new legislation. Let’s fix the broken ticketing system instead. The onus is on event organisers to introduce tools for keeping tickets out of the hands of resellers. For example, they could make the tickets non-transferable. Or indeed, should an unforeseen circumstance prevent a fan from being able to attend, that person should be allowed to resell the ticket at its face value at the ticket exchange.

Concertgoers have more power than they might think to change the current state of ticketing. And the only way consumers are going to change it is to tell themselves not to buy marked-up tickets from scalpers. Granted, if they fail to buy the concert tickets, they will not get to go, but at the same time, the scalpers will not reap excessive profits.

The time is now to stop ticket scalpers from reselling tickets at sky-high prices and making easy, fat profits at the expense of concertgoers.

Save by subscribing to us for your print and/or digital copy.

P/S: The Edge is also available on Apple's App Store and Android's Google Play.