Mr. Kieran Grace:

Let us take for example a concert in Croke Park and there is a capacity for 80,000 people. There is a perception that 80,000 tickets will be available for purchase by the public but that is often not the case. In fact, many tickets are pre-sold by the promoters or the artists. In the UK and US, in some cases more than half of the tickets can be pre-sold, pre-allocated or distributed beforehand. In that case, if tickets go to a cohort of people or large groups of people before the tickets are released for general sale to the public and the recipients do not want to go, then they are in the position straightaway to advertise the ticket on a secondary site and at a time when demand is at its maximum.

Let us say a concert is due to take place at 9 o'clock on a Friday night. Everybody from around this country and outside of it who wants to attend is waiting for the tickets to be released for sale on the Ticketmaster website. Let us say a proportion of those tickets are already sitting in a person's hands, and there can be a rule adopted to sell one ticket per person and not have an industrial size sale. Let us say the tickets have been given to the performers' management for fan clubs, etc., and those people do not want to avail of them or they have got more tickets than they need, and they always get more tickets than they need, but they are willing to advertise the tickets on the site straightaway, one could have a situation within a couple of minutes of the big demand push at 9 p.m. on a Friday for tickets to concert X. The secondary market may have a lot of tickets for the concert to sell. Those tickets may not have come from the people who waited for the scheduled ticket release at 9 p.m. yet people already know, in the full knowledge, that they have them.