Ireland’s face-value ticket forum Toutless reopens to the public on Monday August 3rd after a scam attack forced it to shut its doors to the public.
Toutless co-founder Gary Devitt is this week’s guest on the podcast, and we talk about where the Irish music live ticketing industry is at in the face of increased pricing, extra deluxe and platinum tiers and an Americanisation of buying tickets. It’s becoming a concert caste system. Toutless’ face-value fan-to-fan resale is a fundamentally different worldview to what is developing in the industry.
Toutless has been running since 2008. It started as a website Gary Devitt and his friend Alan built so that a handful of mates could pass on tickets they couldn’t use, and it grew into a forum with more than 70,000 registered users trading at face value only.
Then the scammers arrived in force. Two and a half years ago Toutless closed registration to the public, a decision that stalled its growth almost completely and came close to ending it altogether.
On Monday August 3rd it reopens, rebuilt around Trustap, the Irish escrow payment company, with verified accounts, an anti-fraud layer borrowed from a US college sports ticket exchange, and, for the first time in eighteen years, a 8 % fee.
It arrives at a strange moment for Irish ticketing. Tickets.ie ceased trading in early June, leaving festivals including Rockathon, Cowboys and Heroes and the Rory Gallagher International Tribute Festival collectively owed around €1.4m and leaving Ticketmaster without a large domestic competitor.
Prices keep climbing. Pollstar has average ticket prices up 38% on 2019. Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino maintains that live music tickets are still underpriced compared to sport.
And the Oasis reunion sale is still the flashpoint everyone points at, where the Competition and Markets Authority found that Ticketmaster hadn’t used algorithmic dynamic pricing at all, but had released cheaper tickets and then sold the rest as “platinum” at more than double the price with no additional benefit attached.
Song played during episode: POSER – Summerhill
Listen on Apple | Android | Patreon | Pocketcasts | CastBox | Stitcher | Spotify | RSS Feed | Podlink
Let’s go back eighteen years. Why did you set up Toutless in the first place?
Toutless was built as a platform for me and a few friends to share tickets. That was it. A friend of mine, Alan, who is now the founding member along with myself, had a bit of tech knowledge. We built a website. At the time it was mind blowing, and we just shared it with friends.
Then it snowballed. It got picked up by Phantom FM. It got picked up by yourself. We started seeing more and more users who had the same ideals as us. The love for events in Ireland is so ingrained in society, and for a community to build around people being able to share tickets at face value was a huge thing at the time. It still is.
Eighteen years down the line, the face value element has taken a bit of a back seat to the safety element, but it’s still a huge part of why we do what we do. If you buy a ticket for an event, that’s a passion. It’s something you love, something you want to go to. Being able to hand that over to another fan, someone who also loves that band, or the football match, or the GAA game you wanted to catch, is a connection. That’s what really built the Toutless community.
You must know what the hottest tickets in town are, because you can see the number of replies. Right now All Together Now is sold out and on this weekend, and there are a lot of people looking.
The crowd at All Together Now are the people who were going to Electric Picnic ten years ago. Ten years ago they were trading Electric Picnic tickets. All Together Now is a relatively new festival, and the members of our site have continued along with them. They wouldn’t really be the kind of people who go to Electric Picnic these days. Now they have All Together Now, they have Beyond the Pale. There are lots more options for those users, and we can provide somewhere for them to shift their tickets when they need to.
Is it primarily an Irish user base?
About eighty percent of our users are in Ireland, twenty percent in the UK. My assumption is that the twenty percent are Irish people living in the UK coming home for a gig. But you know it yourself, when summer comes around you’re looking at Primavera, you’re looking at Roskilde, you’re looking at Glastonbury. That’s what a lot of Irish music fans spend their summer doing. That’s how we got a European-wide net when it comes to the listings we have.
So why did you need a relaunch?
It’s been a hobby, it’s been a side project. I don’t even live in Ireland any more. I moved out ten years ago and I still keep this up and running as a labour of love, as it’s always been. I love getting home during the summer, grabbing a few tickets, going to some shows, being able to help the community and interact with it.
About eight or nine years in we started to see a lot of scammers hit the website. Things like Electric Picnic were really high value targets. Our site as it stands is a forum. It’s designed for people to communicate, not for people to sell. It works incredibly well for communication. What it doesn’t work well on is security, stopping people being scammed, helping them know who they can trust. All of those elements we had to put together ad hoc as the years went by.
My impression was always that if people were on Toutless, you knew they were trustworthy.
I like to think ninety-nine percent are good hearted. But about two and a half years ago we got hit by what had to be one of these scam centres, spinning up new phone numbers and new emails, reappearing as soon as we could ban them. They had far more sophisticated technology to bypass the meagre security measures we had in place.
So we made a very drastic decision to close the website to the public. The site was getting inundated with scammers and we came very close to shutting it down. After sixteen years of doing this as a labour of love, I didn’t want to see it go. I know our users didn’t want to see it go. I know Alan didn’t. So we started putting into place what we could do. How can we make Toutless safe? How can we keep going, because the scammers have upped their game and we had to do the same.
We’re working with Trustap, the Irish escrow-style payment protection company, who are built on Stripe. So we’re Irish companies all the way down for payment protection. Nobody gets paid until everybody’s happy. If you’re buying a ticket, your money goes into an escrow hold until you’ve received the ticket, then the seller gets paid. For me it’s the only way we can really reopen the website. Otherwise the scammers win and we have to give up.
How does that change things for the user? Is there a cost?
Sellers list for free. They always have done and it will always continue that way. Buyers will pay an eight percent payment protection fee. That bakes in KYC, so it allows us to work with Stripe’s user verification system. If someone’s paying for a ticket, or listing a ticket, they’re a verified user. If there’s a possible fraud case it gets dealt with by Trustap’s fraud department, on top of eighteen years of myself and Alan looking at this.
We’ve also partnered with Student Seats, one of the largest ticket trading platforms for American college sports. They’d have forty or fifty thousand seater venues and hundreds of them. These guys know what they’re doing. The anti-fraud and user protection measures they’ve built into the new Toutless architecture are outstanding.
Adding a fee at all must have been a difficult decision, given eighteen years of not taking a cut.
Adding an extra fee to ticketing is not something we’ve ever wanted to do. It’s something we thought long and hard about. But adding these security protections to our system isn’t cheap and it’s not something we could just offset with Google ads. I’m sure you know yourself, the revenue off Google ads has nosedived. We’re between a rock and a hard place. But the protection and the security that’s going to be there for the ticket buyer and seller is well worth it in my opinion.
Pricing has gone in one direction for years now. You have music and sport on the site. How do you see the difference between the two?
Pricing has always been a major issue with tickets, whether it’s for a gig or a rugby match or, more recently, the World Cup, where they’ve just skyrocketed. It’s insane. I was looking at the seating map for the World Cup final and the cheapest tickets in the nosebleeds were ten thousand dollars.
The Oasis sale was where a lot of Irish and UK fans hit the wall on this. Fans queued for hours and didn’t know what they’d be paying by the time they got to the front.
That’s the scary part. We banned the platinum prices on the site. But the dynamic pricing, particularly with Oasis, was more the cheek of it. I don’t know whether the decision was down to Ticketmaster or the promoter, but Oasis hadn’t played in so long and there are so many huge fans of Oasis in Ireland. For them to bleed them dry, and as you mentioned, you’ve queued for hours, you want that ticket, and here’s an option for five hundred euro, is insane.
If there’s no one there to challenge Ticketmaster, or to tell them this is crazy, they’ll continue to do it. That will become the norm. Dynamic pricing or band pricing will just be regular.
It goes back to why we did this eighteen years ago. Twenty years ago bands would stop in Ireland once in a blue moon. So if you were trying to get a ticket, you were going to have to go to one of the touts outside and pay above face value. That’s where the anger came from originally. And now we see this dynamic pricing and it’s a repeat cycle. They’ve pulled the touting into their own business model and they’re making a mint out of it.
And Tickets.ie going under has left the market even more concentrated.
The dynamic in the Irish ticketing industry is shifting. There is now no large competitor for Ticketmaster. They are standing on their own. They were always a monopoly, but now even more so.
We’re a very small fish in a very large ocean when it comes to going up against Live Nation and Ticketmaster. While they do provide an excellent service, they do charge you for it. It was one of the fears we always had. If Toutless goes, what else is there left? Ticketmaster can charge what they want.
Ticketmaster runs its own resale now too. How has that affected what you offer?
It was inevitable. The resale option was always there. Back when you used to get a physical ticket it did say the ticket was non-transferable, and that can’t be enforced. Ticketmaster reselling, other platforms reselling, I’m all for it, I really am, if they’re enforcing face value.
However, on average, from the research I dived through just before our relaunch, Ticketmaster is charging upwards of twenty to twenty-five percent on top of an initial eighteen or nineteen percent service charge. So on a twenty euro ticket, you could be paying insane fees. That’s actually created a lot of animosity towards Ticketmaster, and the feedback we get from our users is that we’re David versus Goliath. We’re showing them how it should be done and keeping our moral values held high.
The Sale of Tickets Act came in in 2021 and banned resale above face value. Five years on, has it worked?
The idea was to enact quite stringent measures to stop the likes of Viagogo, to stop getmein.com, to stop those. However, it’s been in place for five years now and nobody has been prosecuted.
I’m not saying the Sale of Tickets Act was a bad idea. It was a great idea. But I think it needs more teeth. They need to be able to slap the larger sites who’ve already charged a service charge on the ticket and are now charging extra on top. It doesn’t matter how you wrap it up, they’re still profiting off the face value.
The act only applies to designated events and venues, which makes a lot of it symbolic. Is it a bit of a farce in that way?
No, I think it’s a step in the right direction. We didn’t have any legislation in place before, and for us that was a huge milestone. We were able to help the Irish government on writing the act. They reached out to a number of platforms looking for feedback. Funnily enough, Ticketmaster were the only ones to say you should not go ahead with this act. Everybody else was on board.
When the act was released it was something like venues have to be over a thousand capacity, but then they ignore some venues, like the upcoming golf tours. It seemed to be a bit of a pick and mix as to who gets designated and who doesn’t.
For me it’s setting a base. We started out to stop touts selling above face value, and that act was something we were incredibly happy to see happen at the time. Now I’d love to see a bit more power behind it. I’d love to see things actually happening based off the act.
The UK is looking at copying the Irish approach.
They haven’t put it into legislation yet. It has been announced, in the King’s Speech recently, but they seem to be dragging their feet. A lot of the ticketing companies are quite unhappy with how slow this is.
The UK market is a whole different ball game. It’s incredibly fractured. There isn’t a monopoly there. I spoke with the owner of Twickets a couple of years ago when we first hit the scam issues. I reached out to him because he had quite a similar background to ourselves. He was telling me how fractured the English ticketing industry is, and how, not that it’s a free for all, but there’s so much competition that everybody’s kept on their toes by their competitors.
So you’re opening up to new users again from Monday.
Closing the site to the public is a death knell for any company. We grew by about a thousand users in two years after we closed registration, when we’d been averaging three to four hundred new users a week previously. It was a huge step in a backwards direction.
The average gig goer these days is less worried about face value and more worried about fraud and scams. I get emails on a daily basis asking for access, asking for advice, sob stories about being ripped off on X or Facebook, or people who spent two thousand euro on a glamping pass and turned up at Electric Picnic to find there was nothing there. Things like that really break my heart. So security and fraud protection are front and centre of the new platform. We go live on Monday the third of August and it will be open to the public.
What’s your advice for anyone chasing a sold-out ticket right now?
If it’s too good to be true. You know how it is on the internet, that’s what they look for, especially when it comes to events and gigs. They’re playing with people’s heartstrings. These are events people really want to go to, acts or football games people have a genuine interest in, and the fraudsters are just waiting for that. The scammers know people will be willing to take a risk.
Any time you’re looking at an event to purchase a ticket, just make sure the person providing the ticket can ensure security. Use the likes of Trustap, use Toutless, use an escrow system to make sure the trade goes ahead correctly.
What was the last gig you got to yourself?
I live in Vietnam, up in Hanoi. I’ve been here the past ten years, so usually I get home during the summer and stack up on gigs. The last big show I got to was Rammstein. We made a bet with my dad. He’s a rock head, not a metal head, and he lost a bet with me and my brother, so he had to go to Rammstein. So I flew back and caught an absolutely amazing show. The music scene here in Vietnam is limited. It’s not as thriving as back home.
Final one. If you had a magic wand and could fix the ticketing market for everyone, what would you do?
I think everyone needs to take a leaf out of Whelan’s book. Whelan’s did their summer shows recently where I think it was five quid for the events, really cheap, with a really good lineup. Bring it back to the music lover. That’s what we’re here for. We’re not here to have champagne seats. Everybody wants to see their favourite act. If my magic wand could bring the prices back to the nineties and the eighties, that’s what I’d do.
Look at some of the big acts who aren’t complaining, but who are talking about the financial viability of a tour and how they can’t make it work. I was reading an article about a two week tour in America, I think it was Los Campesinos!. They’re all a little bit older, they take two weeks out of their lives a year to tour the States, and they were completely transparent about the breakdown, what they make and how much it costs. Even a well established band charging twenty or thirty dollars upwards for tickets can’t make it work.
I don’t know where it’s going to go. If the bands aren’t making money but ticket prices are going through the roof, somebody’s making money somewhere, and it’s not sustainable.
The new Toutless opens to the public on Monday August 3rd. Sellers list for free, buyers pay an 8% payment protection fee, and every trade runs through Trustap escrow, so the seller is only paid once the buyer confirms the ticket has arrived.
Niall Byrne is the founder of the most-influential Irish music site Nialler9, where he has been writing about music since 2005. He is the co-host of the Nialler9 Podcast and has written for the Irish Times, Irish Independent, Sunday Times, Totally Dublin, Cara Magazine, Red Bull and more. Niall is a DJ, co-founder of Lumo Club, event curator, Indie Sleaze club promoter, and producer of gigs and monthly listening parties & events in Dublin.
