Moderator: Mellie Price, Front Gate Tickets
Eric Baker, Viagogo
Greg Bettinelli, StubHub
Wayne Forte, Entourage Talent Associates
Don Orris, Ticketmaster
Ross Schilling, Vector Management
John Siehl, Nutter Center
Don Vaccaro, TicketNetwork
Dana Warg, Olympia Entertainment

Don Vaccaro, Greg Bettinelli, Ross Schilling, Eric Baker, Mellie Price, Wayne Forte, Dana Warg, Don Orris and John Siehl

The topic may have been addressed at CIC 2007, but with the numerous changes the ticketing and concert industries have gone through during the past year, it was certain there was still plenty of fire left in the age-old discussion over who exactly owns the ticket.

The decline of the record industry means artists will increasingly look to ticket sales for their main income, along with promoters, buildings and labels who all want to stake their claim.

"All those constituents can now turn around and say one thing - the primary ticketer does not own the ticket," Viagogo's Eric Baker said. "Who doesn't own the ticket is someone who is simply a vendor to the arena, who historically, be-cause of owning a monopoly on the industry has been able to say, the mail vendor owns the mail."

Eric Baker and Greg Bettinelli

"The argument that Ticketmaster does not have a stake in this game is flawed in its premise," said TM's Don Orris. "Any building managers out there contracted with Ticket-master, in many cases there are certain guarantees involved in those contracts, certain advances in those deals, and there is sponsorship money allocated to those buildings. To say we have no stake in the game is a misnomer. We've got hundreds of mil-lions of dollars tied up in those types of deals across the country."

But without the artists, there would be no tickets to sell, Vector Management's Ross Schilling pointed out.

"My perspective is the artist and the fan own the ticket," he said. "Before the show the artist owns it and after the tickets go on sale and are purchased, the fan owns it.

"The vehicle and the attraction of the artist are really what everyone's coming to see and that's what everyone's paying for."

Mellie Price of Front Gate Tickets concurred. "The first step in ticket ownership is with the artist," she said. "At some point somebody pays for that and ... the rights to transact the primary ticket changes."

Olympia Entertainment's Dana Warg explained the issue of ticketing is not as much about ownership as it is about lease agreements.

"Everybody leases everything. We're the lessor, we lease to the promoter, the promoter leases the attraction and we have a licensing agreement with a distribution company," Warg said. But because secondary ticketing has changed that distribution process, "We have to figure out how to make it work for everybody - not just the artist, promoter and venue."

On the venue side, John Siehl of the Nutter Center recalled how secondary ticketing has created a "conflicted legal jungle," sometimes leaving buildings to clean up the mess the secondary market can create.

"I need to put people in my building," Siehl said. "But at the end of the day, the fans stay in Dayton, Ohio, while everybody else leaves and I've got to have a happy fan when they walk out the door."

Don Vaccaro of TicketNetwork echoed that comment. "When that fan has that bad taste in their mouth, it's gonna hurt their perception of how good that venue is and it's going to diminish the possibility somewhat slightly of how quickly they'll return to that venue."

Schilling questioned where the responsibilities of secondary ticketing sites lie in ensuring that the tickets consumers are bidding for do in fact exist. "It doesn't hold water when you're holding first row seats and someone's out there bidding for it a month before the show's on sale when they're not there," he said.

StubHub's Greg Bettinelli countered that "once you've announced the show, a market exists for it."

Wayne Forte

"I see the grosses going up or staying the same, but certainly increasing every year, but I see the numbers of tickets going down," Forte said. "I think we're losing the audience ... The reality is, we're selling less tickets, they're just getting sold for more money."