YOUR favourite band is coming to town, tickets go on sale at 9am the next day, but you've got to be at work. You can't get through on the box office phone line and the internet's down. Tickets sell out in a few hours and you don't have one.

What are you going to do?

Chances are you'll log on to an auction website and make a bid on a pair of tickets.

You'll probably pay more than face value - tickets for Oasis' gig at Poole's Lighthouse in June 2004 were changing hands for ten times their £30 face value - but at least you get to see your favourite band. Everyone's happy, right?

Wrong.

It's possible the most dedicated fan will be content to pay ten times the face value, but what of the the rest of the audience?

The artist doesn't get a slice of the massive mark-up on the ticket; nor does the venue, the promoter, the management or the agent. The only person making money is the seller.

In the old days, ticket touts would wait outside venues at sold-out concerts and ply their trade in the shadows.

Today though, online sales make it possible for individuals and collectives to snap up tickets for big events and sell them on at vast profits.

Tickets for last week's James Blunt concert at the BIC were sold at £25 each, but were being touted on the internet for more than that in the weeks leading up to the gig.

Interestingly, on the day of the show, they were being offered for face value or less. It's a high-risk business after all.

In their first flush of fame two years ago, Arctic Monkeys announced a gig in the BIC's Solent Hall.

Despite limiting the number of tickets available to each person at the box office tickets sold out in record time the day they went on sale. Later that day they were being touted on the internet for many times their £14 face value.

Maybe it was a triumph for natural justice that the bottom dropped out of that market when the BIC upgraded the gig to the Windsor Hall, making thousands of new tickets available.

With the music industry pressing for legislation to outlaw - or at least licence - secondary selling, the government appointed a select committee to look at the issues raised by secondary ticket sales. Last week it reported that it would not be taking any legal action against the touts and called for the industry to regulate itself.

"The objective of the select committee was to reach a satisfactory conclusion on this anti-social business, primarily to protect music fans from being ripped off and exploited, but also to stop some individuals from profiteering and taking money out of the creative industries," says the BIC's Business Development Manager, Chris Jenkins.

"At the outset, the industry wanted to make it illegal to resell a ticket to an entertainment event, as it is with sporting events like a football match. This hasn't happened and so it has come down to the industry ensuring it gets its fair share of the secondary market."

Alistair Wilkinson, chief executive of Lighthouse in Poole agrees with the committee's decision that a ban on secondary ticketing would be difficult to enforce.

"People should go straight to the ticket provider," he says. "Get as close to the source as possible. For example with Lighthouse, when we have something big and in demand, if you're signed up for the email alert you'll know as soon as it happens and be able to get your tickets straight from the provider."

Like many music fans, Lyndon Hogg has used ticket touts when unable to get a ticket.

"If you're desperate to see your favourite band and the venue is sold out, then you'll be prepared to pay extra to a tout. But then if nobody touted there'd be more tickets for everyone."

With the government unwilling to act and venues unable to police the touts, it looks like a secondary ticket market is inevitable.

"Now we know what the government's findings are we will start work on reducing and finally eliminating this anti-social behaviour and make sure our customers can enjoy our venues uninterrupted," says Chris Jenkins.

"Over the last 18 months a number of new online secondary ticket outlets have been created. These sites protect fans by allowing them to swap tickets at face value and work in conjunction with the record labels and promoters to make it happen.

"This, in theory, removes the issue, but obviously does not stop people on other sites and online auctions from continuing.

"These new sites are good news to those people that cannot attend a show for whatever reason and are not interested in making a profit from that hot ticket."