Tried to buy a concert ticket lately? It's a bloody nightmare, isn't it? Online ticket sales, eBay touting and "fan-to-fan" sales are driving up prices in the face of insatiable demand. Could gigs become as prohibitively expensive as Premier League football? James Medd investigates

AT 8.57AM ON 1 FEBRUARY, MY FRIEND Rob logged on to the internet, Googled "Nick Cave Hammersmith" and in a couple of clicks was on seetickets.com. In his other hand he held the phone at the ready. He had prepared for this for three days, since receiving an email from the official website telling him when tickets would go on sale. At precisely 9am he simultaneously clicked on "Buy Tickets" and pressed the call button on his phone.

The website was down and the phone was "experiencing a particularly busy period". After ten minutes of refreshing and redialling, he panicked. He Googled for more sellers and bought from the first one he could find, at nearly three times face value (Rob's had a good year, he likes Nick Cave - give the guy a break). All's well that ends well, sort of. Then on 4 February he discovered that the seller - called London Ticket Shop but based in Hungary - had been declared insolvent amid a barrage of complaints, though not before it had charged his credit card. And Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds added another date.

Welcome to ticketing hell. You may have visited before. It's not just the place where insanely rich people pay £21,000 to see Led Zeppelin. It's where you can't buy tickets for a tour by Maxïmo Park (Maxïmo who?) in 12 months' time. It's where the only place to buy tickets for Morrissey at the Roundhouse is at a 100 per cent mark-up on eBay, so when he walks after four songs you go home with no refund. Where you're offered tickets in a row called T that's somehow also in the "Golden Circle". Where you have to try for three separate "pre-sales" to even get a chance to buy a ticket for REM, whose last good album was 15 years ago. Where you need to find out which promoter favours which ticket agent before you head to their site at the exact time the tickets go on sale. And where you end up acquiring entire new life skills just to go and see some people play some music. But whose bloody fault is it? Well… a lot of people's, actually. Probably including yours.
It didn't used to be like this. "I remember a time," reminisces ITF on the WORD website, "when I sent a cheque off to a PO box, having seen a gig I wanted to go to advertised in a Sunday newspaper. Some weeks later a ticket would arrive, and that would be that. Gigs didn't sell out in 30 seconds, touts in Scotland didn't sell tickets for gigs in London, and there was no such thing as a Golden Circle."

And it's true. Of course, you could always queue if you wanted to, but when those new-fangled credit cards came in it was simply a matter of a phone call, an address, some tickets. Now even the early days of internet booking - log on, tap in, some tickets - take on a summery haze. "At one point internet ticket buying went a bit like this," continues ITF. "At 9am on Friday morning you choose your ticket reseller, and you go and buy tickets, then bitch to your friends about the booking fees."

So what changed? Well, a number of things, the first of which is simply that in the last five years or so far more people have started going to gigs. Eamonn Forde, editor of music trade magazine Five Eight and WORD contributor, pinpoints the turning point of this rise as the televising of Glastonbury in 1994. "It became a massive event, and it really resonated through the industry," he says. "The idea was to televise it for the people who couldn't go, but in fact it fuelled demand. People realised that the coolest thing you could do was go and see a band. It's grown so much that these days people are even starting to base their summer holidays around the festivals."

Why live music has taken such a grip on us perhaps has something to do with the way we increasingly listen to recorded music - on headphones, alone. In comparison the live experience is communal and impossibly vivid. And now that we can all get our mouse on pretty much any recording we want, old and dusty or shiny and new, in an instant, the desire for something that's finite and uncopiable, an actual once-in-a-lifetime experience, is greater. "With records you can sell as many as you want," says Simon Moran, MD of SJM, one of the country's biggest gig promoters. "But with tickets you've only got enough to fill the venue. There's perceived value in that. The digitalisation of life means that people have a natural desire to interact with other human beings. It makes it more valuable." It's a strong desire: this year, one of SJM's festivals, T In The Park, sold out its two ticket offers of 40,000 in an hour each.

The volume of new information on the net has helped pump up the ticketing bubble too. Emailers and networking sites with instant samples mean that we can all be ahead of the game, and this means that predicting a band's popularity is not the science it once was. "Most bands are now bigger than the venues they play because they book the gigs six months in advance," says Eamonn Forde. "The plan might be to play, say, the Astoria with their second single. But if that was a radio hit they could potentially have sold out the same number of nights at the Hammersmith Apollo."
Which is great for the band - but it means that more and more people want tickets, and that makes the tickets more valuable. And the internet, the same place that makes it so much easier to find out about bands and to buy tickets, also makes it easier to realise that value.

FOR A LONG TIME, THE GIG-GOER'S GREAT ENEMY was TicketMaster. When the ticket agents arrived in the mid-'90s, ready to "facilitate" our "transaction", "handle" our details and "service" our needs, and charge for each one, there was widespread horror. It's probably not too much to say that the psychological effect of this still lingers. Ian Flooks was, until 1998, MD of Wasted Talent, ticket agent for U2, The Clash and many more: "Ticketmaster and other ticket agencies came along and they used more of a market force, in terms of deciding what this ‘booking fee' would be. They charged more on top of the figures that you'd agonised over with the band. You had really no control over it. There was a paradigm shift in the mid-'90s. Until then the primary objective for the bands was: what was a fair price, what would the fans be OK with? It certainly wasn't, ‘What's the maximum we can get away with or what can the market stand?' At some point in the mid-'90s there was a moment when the thinking became different and ticket price was no longer something they had to agonise over." This has only increased. For evidence, ask someone to guess how much it would have cost to see Oasis in 1997. It's not likely they'll say £7.50.

But even now, when The Police can charge £90 at Twickenham and still not sate demand, the laws of supply and demand would dictate that bands should be charging more. The existence of a thriving "secondary market" - ie, touts - proves this, at least to the free marketers (which is what touts generally prefer to call themselves). The band, promoter and ticket agent may claim that their motives for pricing include ensuring goodwill towards the band, getting people into the venue to spend more on beer and T-shirts, or in taking a lower risk and a guaranteed income. To the touts they're just afraid to gamble, and are leaving the door open to those who are.

TOUTED TICKETS IN THE UK ARE ESTIMATED to be worth £200m a year, and that kind of figure tells you that it's not just a few blokes with bad teeth and a nasty look about them hanging a round the Apollo. Now it's on the internet, and it's a 24-7 business that takes on several different forms. There are the ticket broker sites: effectively, online touts offering marked-up tickets for sold-out gigs. These online versions of the services that advertise in the back of newspapers are nothing new. But the problem is that there are so many on the internet that it's hard to tell them apart from the TicketMasters of this world, and it's hard to tell which ones are dodgy (my friend Rob can find consolation in a government survey that found that most people can't tell the difference).

Then, of course, there's eBay, and the many ticket-exchange sites set up in its likeness. One old-school street tout, "Dave", tells me how the game has changed. Back in the day, there were the AC/DC gigs where you could make a week's wage in 20 minutes, and there were Runrig gigs where you could be standing in the rain with 50 tickets that were bound for the bin. He tells me about getting £350 for Tom Waits at the Hammersmith Apollo in 2004, but mostly he talks about how "the same people who used to say they hate touts are now the touts themselves".

He means you, of course. It started with sticking a couple of extra tickets on your credit card and selling them to some mates, but it's ended with a booming business in "fan-to-fan" ticket sites. And if you've been charged an array of dubious and alienating mark-ups, why shouldn't you make that back? "In a way it's consumer payback for the live industry," says Eamonn Forde, "but the consumers are really all fighting each other. You don't begrudge a student making 20 quid, but if you've got 2,000 people for a festival doing it, it's a massive problem."

And it's not just students. Many have made it their career. One such person, "Phil", would never have cut it as a tout in the old days - he's "terrified" of the taxman and he's certainly not very menacing, but he's now been making a living out of it for five years. When we speak, he has tickets for sale on eBay ranging from Kylie to Willie Nelson and the Pigeon Detectives, all of them on Buy It Now ("It's quicker, it's better credit control, you can put an instant-payment on it"). And he's quick to defend his honour.

"I'm not doing anything Joe Public can't do," he says. "I go through agencies like anybody else. My job is 90 per cent research, looking through magazines, registering with band's websites to get advance warning. I know what to buy. You've got to be ahead of the game." It's not, he says, a licence to print money: "I'm never going to be a millionaire. You can lose a lot more money than you make if you don't know the product. My expenditure last year was £80,000. You need a pretty chunky credit card for that."

It's getting tougher, according to Phil. "I was one of the first people selling tickets on eBay. Five years ago there might have been six listings for a good gig; now there's six pages." Of course, anyone competing with Phil could also be competing with you. And eBay is far from the only site for ticket selling. The last few years have seen the arrival of fan-to-fan auction sites, which operate in just the same way and make their money by charging commission (often as much as 15 per cent of the sale price from the seller and 10 per cent from the buyer).

The mother of them all is the US site StubHub, now a major destination for tickets over there. eBay bought the site for £310 million last year, after which one of StubHub's founders came to the UK and set up viagogo.co.uk. Others among the 240 or so in action include GetMeIn.com, recently bought by TicketMaster - which already runs TicketExchange.com and hosts auctions on its own site - and seatwave.com. The last of these is a classic of the genre, advertising itself as "The fan-to-fan ticket exchange", covering its site in matey language ("We'll admit when we screw things up") and talking a lot about transparency ("It's generally accepted economic theory that transparent markets are more efficient and help to reduce prices"). But there are still commissions, prices are above face value… and it's still effectively touting. "There's a nice side to all this," says Steve Parker, managing editor of Audience and Live UK, two trade magazines for the live-music industry. "It means that ordinary people who can't go to the gig for some reason can sell their tickets to someone else. But when touts start using it, it gets muddied. These websites have got huge amounts of American dollars behind them, and they would never make money from people who just couldn't go to the gig. They make their money by encouraging mass touting."

The consequences of this explosion in touting, both professional and amateur, go beyond forcing people who want to see a band to pay more. Often tickets end up not being used at all - while there are empty seats in the venue. "Secondary ticketing distorts the market," says SJM's Simon Moran. "You might put a concert on and sell a load of tickets, but you've really only sold half of them [to people coming to the show], and demand falls off because lots of people are trying to sell the others on. You could have sold 50,000 but there's still 20,000 floating around with touts of some sort."

But worse even than incompetent amateur touts is what's happened in the US and is surely taking over here: the rise of the robots. TicketMaster US claims that on some days up to 80 per cent of requests may be from 'bots, as they're called - the software that sends in multiple ticket applications that appear to come from different locations, thus getting round a site's automated allocation rules. Last October, this subject made headlines in the US when tickets for teen star Hannah Montana sold out nationwide in ten minutes, only to pop up on StubHub at vast prices moments later. Your average rock fan may be used to this kind of thing but hell hath no fury like a soccer mom scorned. That same month, TicketMaster successfully placed an injunction on RMG Technologies' "specialised browser", the very cheekily named PurchaseMaster. The case is due in court this October. Most experts put the US five years ahead of us in terms of secondary ticketing. Should we be trying to sort it out here before things get worse? Hal Vogel, author of Entertainment Industry Economics, says not - the whole thing will reach equilibrium through the free market.

"The value of most tickets is more than the posted price, so that there ought to be a free market in them," he says. "The field is tilted by the 'bots but that will ultimately be reversed and concertgoers will again have a chance to pay somewhat less than now, because they won't be competing with autodiallers and machines with unlimited buying credit." He points to a US court case last year where TicketMaster sued StubHub for selling tickets for a Lynyrd Skynyrd tour to which TicketMaster had "exclusive rights", to show that "the market and judicial system will eventually level the field. Ultimately there'll be revenue sharing between record companies and artists, so that both capture the premium and do better than they do now."

Vogel is American, and the American answer seems to be all about embracing the secondary market. Artists including Beyoncé have taken to auctioning the best seats for their shows, and laws against touting are being repealed across America so that government can start taxing that revenue. In the UK, the fear is more that, as with Premiership football, gigs could price themselves out of the market. But those in the profession have been taking action. The Concert Promoters Association have long been lobbying the government to intervene on their behalf (or rather, on behalf of gig-goers). Earlier this year the Culture, Music & Sport Select Committee decided against doing anything, calling instead for "goodwill" and suggesting the resale sector "clean up its act". Thought quite amusing, this is no use to anyone.

SO, THE CONCERT PROMOTERS ASSOCIATION threatened last month to "solve" the problem by starting to resell tickets themselves - in effect, joining the touts. "Promoters and their agents want their part of the secondary market," said the CPA's Rob Ballantine. "It's open season." Meanwhile, around 400 artist managers under the leadership of former Island Records MD Marc Marot have formed the Resale Rights Society, aiming to impose a levy on resold tickets that would go back to the artists. This is a curious and impractical idea. There is, after all, no real need for touts any more. In the past, when you had to buy tickets in person at box offices, maybe the tout provided a valuable if distasteful service. But now, theoretically, we can all get tickets for ourselves. The Government banned the resale of football tickets - to keep rival fans apart - and there are plans to do the same for the 2012 Olympics. So why not take the whole business out while they're at it?

It seems that making resale illegal would not be nearly as hard as the doubters suggest. The long-ignored terms and conditions on the back of each ticket still state, after all, that they are "non-transferable" and "not for resale". Occasionally, this power is invoked - Kylie Minogue demanded that touted tickets for her comeback tour were cancelled, the Newcastle Metro voided tickets resold for Take That and Australian festival The Big Day Out attempted to do the same for their 2007 event (though they were consequently sued by eBay and lost on a technicality). There's more of a willingness to threaten its use too, as The Arcade Fire did last year. We can enforce airline tickets as non-transferable, so why not gig tickets? It's little work to check a proof of purchase or even a name printed on a ticket - about the same as, say, checking someone's bag on the way into a venue for food, drink or recording equipment.

eBay and co defend their actions on the basis that they offer a service to those who find themselves unable to attend a gig and can't get a refund. Perhaps promoters should show willing with the return of "returns". And if that's really the ticket-exchange sites' motivation, then why not follow the example of "ethical ticket exchange" ScarletMist.com (motto: "We don't need touts, scalpers, whores and mercenaries. We can do this ourselves") on a non-profit, face-value basis?

If they want to fight the good fight against overpriced, touted tickets, gig-goers could always simply use Scarlet Mist themselves. Beyond that, we should all perhaps start treating gigs more like the valuable but transitory experiences they are. After all, if we buy food and realise we're not going to eat it, we don't expect to be able to resell it. We can give it away, or we can miss out. Another thing we can do is to vote with our feet. There is an amazing obsession with big shows - festivals, arenas - but if fans can be encouraged to trade down to smaller venues, where the atmosphere is sometimes better and the price certainly is (£6 to get into the Barfly, say, for an act that might become your next favourite), they will share the love (and money) around. This in turn would lower demand and prices all the way up the scale.

But, as with all aspects of the new-model music business, the acts (or their managers) are going to have to take charge here. Ultimately, no one cares who promoted the show, who sold them the ticket or even particularly where it happened. It's the band they remember, the band who gave them a good time or ripped them off. Whether they started it or not, the acts themselves are going to have to finish this. Organising pre-sales for loyal fans isn't enough any more. They also need to play enough shows to satisfy demand, or else eventually it'll be too much of a pain for us to bother coming to see them at all. And then where will they be?

So what's your prescription for the future? More shows? Legislation? Staying at home? Let us know.