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Unless you have plenty of time, getting hold of a concert ticket before it sells out is not easy. For example, the whole 2,500,000 tickets were bought up for the up-and-coming U2 tour of the US. So just how can someone who’s got a full time job get to purchase a ticket if they’re selling out so quickly?

Go to the second-hand market.

In the grim days before the internet, you had to buy your second-hand ticket through a dodgy tout at the actual event. This inevitably meant getting ripped off, or even perhaps given bogus tickets which would inevitably be spotted as you entered the event - meaning you not only miss the music gig or sports event, you’ve wasted a lot of dosh in the process.

However, matters have improved for music and sports lovers. The secondary ticket market has cleaned up its act in the last decade or so, with much thanks to the internet. These days there is so much competition to resell tickets on the internet, the marketplace has actually become self-regulating. The tickets you sell don’t have insurance? I’ll get my ticket from another website! And so many ticket agents provide insurance if the gig or event is cancelled. And with stiff competition online, resale tickets have become cheaper to the point that sometimes you’re not spending much more than the actual original price of the ticket.

These days you can get tickets for many kinds of sports events and concerts. From basketball games to soccer to cricket, to getting hold of decent seats for your favourite band; secondary tickets provide a second chance to go to the gig you want to see. So what to expect online? Use a search engine like Google and type in your keywords like Green Day tickets, and you will discover a large array of resale ticket agents who can offer that very ticket to you.

Not everyone is content with secondary tickets however. For example, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails calls secondary ticket agents “parasites”, and he’d like to see an end to the resale of event tickets. However, he’s missing the point of resold tickets : people simply do not have the time to queue up for tickets. They’re more likely working when the tickets are on sale, and physically cannot be in the right place at the right time to get hold of the ticket they want in that precious 60 or so minutes it takes for an entire tour to sell out.

While there is strong competition between secondary ticket agents, we believe this is a much needed service for true fans who were unable to buy the tickets the first time around.