Prince: "I'm going down to Alphabet Street/I'm gonna smack the first tout that I meet..." Photograph: Kevork Djansezian/AP
In our final instalment of what we're now officially calling Prince Week at Guardian Unlimited... Tickets for the great showman's seven-night residency at London's 02 Arena went on sale this morning, and predicatbly sold out in a matter of hours. Even given the magnitude of the artist and the generously low price of £31.21 a head, clearing around 200,000 tickets in one morning is quite an achievement for one man, espcially given that he hasn't had a hit in years.
More predictably, the odious secondary ticketing market is now benefiting from Prince's fair pricing. Viagogo are now selling tickets for all seven shows. Prices start at £73 and are currently capped at the, well, princely sum of £171. Seatwave prices are currently between £88.99 and £120.
The utter grossness of this "market" is particularly transparent when you think about how swiftly these tickets appeared online to be resold, quadrupling in value for the honour of having passed through one person's hands to another. It's difficult to see how Tessa Jowell can defend secondary ticketing agencies as some kind of democratic right when it essentially renders the words "face value" to be meaningless.
Once upon a time, gig goers without tickets knew their only hope lay in an insalubrious exchange with a shifty looking fella in an alley round the back of the venue. Now the exchange has gone online and it may be well all official and slickly digital but it's no more wholesome. It's made touts of all of us.
If ever there was a reason not to purchase tickets from one of these companies before (as if the price alone doesn't exclude most of us - you could get yourself a division three season ticket for less!), then surely this morning's ticket frenzy is it. Prince was offering his fans a fair chance to see him for an affordable price, but thanks to the electronic touts it seems that wasn't his decision.
