Last week, Finland's Consumer Disputes Board ruled that ticket holders are entitled to a 50 per cent refund if a performance is objectively muck enough.
More specifically, the show needs to be “well below reasonably expected standards”.The performance that caused the ruling was a Chuck Berry show. One young Finn brought a case to court because the musician seemed “a bit fatigued”. This pseudo-ageism was accepted by the board, with the caveat that the bad must be obvious, or at least there must be a“generally agreed view that the concert was a failure”.
Judged on these standards, Irish pessimism would challenge everything, but an inherent lack of agreement would lead to no one being refunded. Flanking every criticism with “fair play to the lads all the same” does little to reinforce the dismay.
But there are some strong cases to be made for reimbursements, and the Finnish approach might at least reduce the amount of junk that gets thrown at the stage by angry fruit eaters. The crowd took matters into their own hands during The Fratellis’ 2008 Oxegen set, and flung oranges at the indie boyos. Would the fruit be admissible as evidence in court?
Another legal yardstick could be the amount of airtime any one gig gets on the Joe Duffy show – a rule that would make the Barbra Streisand gig of 2007 the most refundable of all time. An isolated group of well-to-do Streisand fans are still navigating their way through bottleneck traffic in north Kildare to this day.
