If £75 was a high price for a ticket to see Michael Jackson perform live in London, it is an awful lot to pay for a souvenir of his truncated life. However, you have to admire the cheek of the concert organisers in allowing fans to keep their tickets instead of accepting a refund.

Jackson memorabilia will undoubtedly have a value. Look at the market for things associated with the Beatles and Elvis. And Jacko will not be generating more of it in future. How much an unused ticket for an unheld concert will be worth is debatable, but there will be value.

What will hold down that value, however, is that there are potentially so many tickets. The promoters sold 750,000 seats for his 50 concerts at the O2 arena.

Just as people who kept the newspapers with front pages announcing Jacko’s death will find, their commemorative value is diluted because there are so many papers featuring his death, not only in Los Angeles and London but around the world.

Perhaps tickets for the first of the 50 London concerts will have a premium value – “his first scheduled gig after he died” – or the last - “his final planned performance” - but there are so many competing claims to specialness. His “last” concert was actually the last time he sang in public and anyone who kept their tickets then (probably most who attended) will have something of value.

And that is the problem with the tickets becoming collectors’ items: there are so many competing bits of Jackson memorabilia, from T-shirts to re-released records. An opportunist would already be selling the programmes produced (genuinely or not) for the O2 concerts.

Of course, the fewer fans who convert their receipts for buying tickets into actual hard tickets – “designed by Michael” – the more rare and more valuable they will be. But who is to say the commemorative value of the receipts is less than that of the tickets?

And what of the fans who bought tickets on the secondary market, perhaps paying £150 for a £75 ticket? Unless they bought through eBay or can find the vendor to reclaim their cash, they face losing money if they seek a refund at face value or face overpaying for a souvenir ticket.

The worry is what happens to the tickets that would have gone to fans who choose to take refunds. Will the organisers be free to sell the unclaimed tickets, thus ensuring that all 750,000 remain in circulation and thus flood the market, ruining it for the fans who forfeited the £50 or £75 they have already paid?

Each fan that keeps the ticket instead of the cash is giving a nice profit to the organisers, but to preserve the value of their souvenir they must ask what happens to the unissued tickets. As an “investment” the tickets carry a large degree of risk.

Share this: