If you consider yourself a concert aficionado in South Africa, you may be glad to know that you can resort to legal options if you are dissatisfied with the management of concerts. This is part of their new Consumer Protection Act, and it provides music lovers and concert goers the right to complain about receiving less than par, or simply awful service. Well, people who go to concerts are still consumers. They pay tickets, so it's only right that they receive good service as consumers. The Act aims to make companies handling concerts to improve their service.
The director of Norton Rose in Johannesburg, Rosalind Lake, talked about the new Act. Concert goers are actually quite entitled to the service that average consumers receive. It's not clear to us whether we can complain about bad performances on stage, but people certainly have the right to complain when they think that they didn't get what they paid for.
If you went to a concert venue to watch an artist who cancels the show because they are drunk, then you can go to the organisers of the concert to get your refund. But you can't head for the performer and rant at them. It's the organizers that bring people to perform, so making sure the artist can and will perform is their duty. You can get a claim in a situation like this.
But what if an artist didn't sound good or their throat was hoarse? It seems unclear whether you can ask for refund if you were not satisfied with the way a singer sang on their show. Satisfaction is quite a subjective thing. Lake said that it was difficult to say that an artist did not sing properly or perform they way they are expected.
According to her, you can ask for a refund of a portion that you paid, but not the whole amount. The reason for this is that receiving a service is different from buying goods. You can return the latter and get your money back, but you cannot do that with the former. A performance is likened to a service offered. Bad performance equals bad service, but bad service is different from no service at all. Hence, you cannot get total refund for a bad service.
This is warning to concert promoters to stop making false promises about events. This means that concert organizers should plan their shows appropriately and that concert goers should be informed about difficulties in advance. Lake said that the advice in this law is do not charge people for something other than what you have promised.
The Act requires organizers to issue notice to people ahead of time if an artist could not come because of sickness or other serious reasons. People can claim refund if they have come to the venue because organisers failed to announce to them that the artist isn't coming.