Putting money where mouths are
Chris has a great piece about today’s Live 8/eBay collision over at qwghlm. In it, he quotes Sir Bob:
The people who are selling these tickets on websites are miserable wretches who are capitalising on people’s misery. I am appealing to their sense of decency to stop this disgusting greed.
Sir Bob Geldof, ladies and gentlemen, hostage to fortune.
I’d be quite interested to know, when Bob and Elton and Robbie and Madonna and the Pink Floyd chaps get their royalty cheques this year, whether, upon noticing a spike in album sales correlating with their appearances at Live 8, they will donate the difference to Make Poverty History or a similar charity.
If not, they are miserable wretches who are capitalising on people’s misery. I am appealing to their sense of decency to stop this disgusting greed.
(File under: Live 8)
Posted on June 14th, 2005 at 9:35 pm
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It’s also bollocks because eBay were offering their entire fee to MPH, which is more than o2 have done with the text message profits. And anyway, who’s to say some of the profits from stupid people buying tickets wouldn’t have gone to MPH, too?
Plus, why does everything have to be made against the law, like he wanted? If people want to re-sell tickets, for anything, let them. So what?
Has it occured to him that, if the tickets are indeed going for thousands on ebay, it probably means he could have sold them for thousands himself?
Perhaps he should have got some yield management experts in and sold them easyJet style.
There seems to be some kind of consensus that Geldof has no right to get incensed over the exploitation of what is, at heart, a humanitarian effort; or further still that he should have sold the tickets off. But using the concert to raise funds would serve only to confuse the message of the Make Poverty History campaign.
MPH is definitively NOT about raising funds; at no stage of the campaign have supporters been asked for donations. Yes, the white bands cost money; yes, the Live8 ticket lottery cost money. But I think we can reasonably expect a service to cost a small fee, as a co-ordinated effort like this also costs money to run.
As Ebay pointed out, reselling the tickets is not illegal; it’s immoral, but the free market by it’s nature is amoral. Just because that is so, however, doesn’t mean we should all sit back and let immoral acts occur without comment. The idea that anything goes is totally contrary to what I believe in.
It’s a shame that a genuinely concerted, progressive effort such as MPH is being shot at by both sides just because of the involvement of a man for whom some people have a strange antipathy.
Cheeks, I don’t have any antipathy towards Geldof. I just question whether a one-off event is the best way to go about this and, if he’s going to go on national television and be holier-than-thou, he should get his (and others’) house in order.
Surely nobody thinks that the performers at Live 8 aren’t going to see an increase in record sales after Live 8. If they don’t give that money to charity then, by Geldof’s logic, they are profiting from the suffering of others. Or are we to accept that selling more records is a “tip” for appearing?
As with ALL ticket touting - as this basically is - the problem is not that there are people selling stuff way over the odds, more it is that there are people just plain daft enough to pay over the odds.
While Live8 is a one-off event, it’s only a part of a long and concerted effort; it’s one element of the MPH campaign.
If artists want to be involved in Live8 purely because they are going to profit from increased record sales, then yes they deserve as much castigation as the people who profit from ticket sales. But if an artist wants to be involved in the concert because he believes it’s the right thing to do, then he’s not actively setting out to gain personally and can’t be lumped in with the profiteers.
Cheeks, you didn’t really address my point. In it for the money or not, it’s very likely these performers are going to see a rise in record sale royalties directly linked to their appearance at Live 8.
If they keep that money, regardless of their reasons for appearing, then yes, they can be lumped in with the profiteers.
Cheeks, just to clarify - I’ve not axe to grind with MPH. It’s just since Geldof’s reared his head things have gone slightly pear-ahaped.
He’s proving a devisive figure, contradictory when he ad-libs and, I’m sorry to say, comes off as something of a dilettante on the issues.
Him lending his imprimatur to shaky ventures isn’t helping either.
_ it’s immoral, but the free market by it’s nature is amoral_
Amoral and immoral are completely different things. And of course the market is amoral: it’s a system. One way streets are amoral, but also very useful.
So, on to immoral. How do you know the purposes for selling those tickets was immoral. For all you know, the bulk of the proceeds were going to charity. At the very least, eBay’s fees would have been donated. So, in return for empty grandstanding, a chunk of money that could have been used to help someone somewhere has been forgone. For what? So you could have your say on what is and isn’t immoral? What’s the point in that?
If you wrote an article for free for a charity magazine and, as a direct result of that, were commisioned to write a freelance piece for a magazine which paid you £1,000, would you feel obliged to hand over all or some of that money to the charity which instigated your receiving that money? Wouldn’t the fact that you had helped the charity with your time and effort be enough? I can’t see that’s profiting; that’s being rewarded.
Should we also tell the stagehands and roadies and security and food and drink vendors that they have to hand over all their wages for the day because no-one can benefit from this? Or shall we just draw the line at parasites who contribute nothing and stand to gain a fortune from it?
_shall we just draw the line at parasites who contribute nothing and stand to gain a fortune from it?_
Do you mean eBay here? They had already said all their fees would go to charity. Or do you mean the touts themselves? Do you really think that de-listing the tickets from eBay will mean they won’t sell them now? Or has the entire net effect from this been:
1. People get to feel good about upholding spurious morality; and
2. The money eBay would have donated to charity will now not materialise.
?
Cheeks, let’s get back to first principles:
Geldof says people selling Live 8 tickets on eBay are profiteers, profiting from the suffering of others.
By that logic, anybody profiting from Live 8 is profiting from the suffering of others be it him, Robbie Williams, the hot dog sellers or whoever.
I didn’t write the rule, Geldof did when he slipped his minders yesterday and started making it up on the spot on the national media outlets.
And are “stagehands and roadies and security” going to be paid? If so than that makes them no better than the black artists the concert organisers insinuated in the Times had demanded payment for appearing. Or is it the case that the little people deserve a few quid for their labours and the pop stars don’t?
In that case I’ll take the theoretical £1,000 quid - I need it more than Madonna. She’ll be gaining a damn sight more than that as will the rest.
Jarndyce: I don’t believe anyone asked for the sales of tickets to be illegal, as you said in your first post, they just asked a company to take a stand against something they found immoral - as I did. If you genuinely believe that selling the tickets on would have benefited charities, I hope you wrote to Ebay to express your support.
Maybe the touts will go and sell elsewhere. Maybe not. But at least they’re not selling there anymore.
_If you genuinely believe that selling the tickets on would have benefited charities,_
I do. Don’t you? Don’t charities dealing with poverty need every penny they can get?
_ I hope you wrote to Ebay to express your support._
I don’t need to. In a free market, simply taking my custom there to flog my old Mac this weekend will be seen as tacit support. Which it is.
_Maybe the touts will go and sell elsewhere. Maybe not._
Are you crazy? Of course they will go elsewhere…ever been to an event of any kind anywhere in the world that you couldn’t find a tout hanging around? All the pointless grandstanding has done is ensure eBay’s proposed charity donation will not now happen.
Justin, I think what you’re doing is taking an argument to it’s logical extreme, which isn’t generally helpful.
You’re also directing a lot of criticism at artists for, in essence, performing a good deed. Whereas the people who are doing absolutely nothing except trying to profit escape your castigation entirely.
I take on board all criticism of MPH, Geldof, Live8, Madonna, anyone at all. There’s arguments to be made against all of it. But to criticise everything and everyone except the profiteering touts? Is that right?
Cheeks, I think we’ve reached the point where we’re going to have to agree to disagree and shake hands on it. I respect your position and know from your site that you’re a admirably passionate activist for MPH.
So I’ll just say this. I don’t think I took my argument to a logical extreme. I just think that Geldof can’t have one rule for ticket touts and one for millionaire popstars. Don’t you think Robbie Williams banking a fat royalty cheque generated by a charity appearance is a bit queasy? I’d challenge all the artists to stand up at Live 8 and say “If you’ve enjoyed my muic today, don’t go and buy my album but send the money to MPH and download my album from Kazaa.”
As for the touts, I suppose it leaves a bad taste but then nobody’s being cheated out of any money. Nobody’s going to die - these people are merely expoiting a loophole in a market created by Geldof himself. He’s angry at a moral grey area not a question of theft.
If only he would bring such fire and brimstone to bear on Blair and Bush. It would really be something to hear him say:
“The people who advocating privatisation in Africa are miserable wretches who are capitalising on people’s misery. I am appealing to their sense of decency to stop this disgusting greed.”
Privatisation, after all, causes more misery in Africa than ticket touts. I know others within MPH have said similar but they can’t demand instant TV coverage like Geldof did yesterday.
I was just about to come back and apologise for over-running; I forgot the old internet maxim that after three comments in a thread you’re going nowhere.
I know that we agree on many issues, but on this we will have to part ways. I cannot argue in defence of the free market against a (perhaps over-)passionate advocate of change.
>>I cannot argue in defence of the free market against a (perhaps over-)passionate advocate of change.
Excellent parting shot. That stings!
Like I said, Bob’s railing against the wrong free market: Live 8 tickets and not Africa’s resources.