THE Led Zeppelin reunion concert last Monday night at the O2 Arena was the hottest – and most expensive – ticket in town.

One fan shelled out a whopping £21,000 on eBay to see the heavy-metal pioneers play again. Others were not so lucky. Security arrangements were stepped up to clamp down on touting and fans had to show photo ID to collect their tickets.

The concert’s promoter, Harvey Goldsmith, has been a fierce critic of what he calls ticket touting, saying that it is “illegitimate profiteering” because performers receive no share of the revenues generated in the secondary market.

Goldsmith has singled out internet-based firms that provide a facility for people to buy and sell tickets for concerts, West End shows and sports events. Sites doing this include Viagogo, founded by entrepreneur Eric Baker, who set up a similar venture in America called Stubhub, which he sold to eBay for more than $300m (£147m), and Seat-wave, whose backers include Atlas Ventures and Mangrove Capital. While they do not sell tickets themselves, they collect a commission from people trading tickets on their sites and would not regard themselves as touts.

These sites have become big business. Viagogo, for example, has partnerships with football clubs such as Manchester United and Chelsea. Baker said that in its first year, Viagogo had sold more tickets than Stubhub had managed after year three.

Tixdaq, a company that tracks secondary ticketing, estimates that the market for the resale of tickets for pop concerts in Britain is worth about £200m.

Across Europe, the total resale market is thought to be worth in the region of £1 billion.

While Goldsmith has been the most outspoken critic, there are plenty of other music-industry figures getting increasingly angry about the level of reselling. Jazz Summers, manager of The Verve, estimates that the six-date mini-tour the band are doing at the moment has grossed £360,000 in resold tickets. “That’s equivalent to a big chunk of what the band will earn from the tour,” he said.

The government, too, is becoming concerned about the rise in secondary ticketing after a number of cases where music fans were caught out by forged tickets for shows or had paid hugely over the odds to gain entry.

A Department for Culture, Media and Sport select committee has debated the matter and heard evidence from interested parties. Its report is due to be published early in the new year.

Opinion is divided over what to do. Nobody wants to see fans exploited, but nor does anyone want to stop people from selling on their tickets if they have a genuine reason for doing so, for example because they are too ill to attend a show.

This is precisely how businesses such as Viagogo got started. Baker argues that his company provides a safe means of procuring genuine tickets, without running the risk of having to deal with a tout or buying tickets sight unseen on eBay.

The sports lobby thinks the government should create a list of protected events where the reselling of tickets for profit would be illegal, just as it does to ensure that some events are guaranteed to be shown on free-to-air television. This could include Wimbledon and Ashes cricket.

It is already illegal to tout tickets for football matches and legislation has been passed to put in place this kind of protection for the 2012 London Olympics and the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Scotland.

A submission to the committee from a group representing five of Britain’s largest sports said: “Sport does all it can to address [touting]. However, it’s no longer an issue we can manage on our own. We believe there’s a proven need for statutory regulation.”

Differing sections of the music industry have proposed various solutions. The Concert Promoters Association, a trade body, wrote in a submission to the select committee: “As a matter of principle, the CPA believes that tickets should not be resold for commercial gain.”

But a new potential solution has emerged, which has gained some traction. Marc Marot, manager of DJ Paul Oakenfold and former boss of Island Records, this month established the Resale Rights Society, a body that would collect a royalty from ticket resellers that could be ploughed back into the industry. It has the backing of more than 400 artist managers.

The proposal has been met with hostility from resellers. Baker said: “The idea makes no sense at all. If I sell my copy of Harry Potter, JK Rowling does not get a cut – she doesn’t get paid twice.”

This argument has received short shrift from the music lobby. Marot said that no matter how many times a ticket might change hands before a concert took place, it was “a brand-new piece of intellectual property every time”.

So far, neither side has been willing to cede much ground. The agents have yet to reveal precisely the scale of the royalty they think would be appropriate, and it is not clear what sort of impact it would have on companies such as Viagogo. Baker declined to discuss “hypotheticals”.

When the select committee report finally emerges, it is likely to stop short of recommending an all-out ban on ticket reselling. John Whittingdale, the committee’s chairman, recently said that “if the government goes and bans something online, nine times out of ten it won’t work”.

He argued that some form of self-regulation would be the best solution, and appeared to endorse a levy system. “There’s no doubt that the internet has created new challenges to wrestle with,” Whittingdale told New Media Age, a trade magazine.

“I think there’s a solution through some kind of agreement between all the players in the market in which they all recognise that the secondary-ticket seller should make a contribution to the person whose intellectual property they’re selling.”

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