Newsbeat's guide to... ticket booking fees

By Natalie Jamieson
Newsbeat entertainment reporter

You buy a £15 ticket to see your favourite artist but just before you click to purchase, extra charges are added on bumping up the price.

One of those will be a booking fee, which you have to pay even if you end up printing your ticket at home.

So what goes into a booking fee to make it cost extra and is this fee ever likely to go away?

Some of the big players in the music ticket world give their views.

Chris Edmonds, managing director of Ticketmaster UK

Why do you charge a booking fee on top of the price of a gig ticket?

There's a misunderstanding about what the fees are for and the revenues that Ticketmaster would actually get.

In reality we wouldn't see any share of the actual ticket price, that would be shared between the promoter, venues and the artist.

The actual per ticket fees that we charge to the consumer are our sole source of revenue.

In some instances Ticketmaster doesn't even retain all those fees.

Some of those may be shared with the actual event organiser.

Why do I still have to pay if I print my ticket at home?

We can only offer our customers print at home tickets if we're working with a venue and we've got our access control systems in there so it's a contribution in terms of that cost.

Our objective is to get all tickets onto mobiles, onto people's payment cards or give consumers the option to print at home.

As that progresses over the next few years then I actually think there will be more flexibility in terms of the fees we charge.

Rebecca Kane, general manager of the O2 London, spokesperson for AXS tickets

Why do you charge a booking fee?

Everyone will be familiar with service charge fees and our service fees are very comparable to what Ticketmaster do.

I think the advantage for AXS is we don't actually charge for print at home because if you're using your own machine and you're using your own ink and your own paper why should we charge you for that?

People will move more and more to print at home.

We already do for boarding passes for getting on a flight. You don't get charged for print at home.

Joe Vesayaporn, squadron leader, Music Glue, a music technology company

Can you explain your booking fee and how much you charge?

The booking fee is the cost to the company that is providing the ticketing service so you've got payment processing and customer support and getting things shipped ou, plus a little bit of profit for the company that are selling the ticket.

We have a 10% booking fee on average.

There are a few that are around our mark but quite a few are more expensive than that.

Follow @BBCNewsbeat on Twitter