We’ve all been there, sitting at our computers or on our phones, fingers poised, waiting for tickets to become available for a must-see gig. The countdown ends, you hit refresh, and nothing. Sold out. Seconds later, those same tickets appear on resale websites, but this time, for two or three times the original price.
That sinking feeling isn’t just about missing out, it’s the realisation that the demand wasn’t all from genuine fans. Instead, it was partially driven by those looking to make a profit – the ticket touting scalpers that inevitably end up asking if anyone wants “Animals for Leaders” tickets outside of an Animals as Leaders gig hours before the show starts (true fans clearly).
In this post, I’ll explore ticket touting UK style, why it exists, the economics behind it, and whether there’s a fairer way forward for fans, with a particular focus on the UK’s live event landscape, including a piece of regulation currently working its way through Parliament that could change the picture significantly.
Why Does Ticket Touting Exist?
At the heart of the issue is simple economics – supply and demand. For high-profile events, demand far exceeds supply at the price the ticket is originally sold for. That’s really a price ceiling by another name, the face value sits below what the market would actually clear at, which creates a shortage, and shortages get rationed somehow. Here, they’re rationed by who has the fastest bot, not by who’s willing to pay the most, which is precisely the gap a scalper steps into.
Let’s say a ticket for a popular concert costs £75. Demand for this event is so high that people are willing to pay £250 or more on resale sites. That difference is profit for whoever controls the ticket, and the incentive to control one is strong.
It is worth being precise about the mechanics here – this isn’t really arbitrage in the strict sense, there’s no risk-free, simultaneous buy-and-sell.
A tout buys a ticket and then has to hope the resale price holds up, that the event doesn’t get cancelled, and that a buyer actually turns up before face value information requirements (more on that below) make the listing unattractive. It’s closer to speculative price discovery than true arbitrage, touts are betting on a gap that theory says shouldn’t persist but that, in practice, reliably does.
They often use bots to snap up large numbers of tickets the moment they’re released, shutting out real fans almost instantly.
Using bots for this purpose has actually been a criminal offence in the UK since 2018, under regulations made through the Digital Economy Act 2017, but enforcement against individuals operating anonymously and often overseas remains difficult. These tickets are then resold on secondary platforms like Viagogo, StubHub, or historically GetMeIn and Seatwave, often at a significant markup.
Oasis and Demand-Led Pricing
A recent example worth noting was the 2025 Oasis reunion tour, which was heavily criticised for how ticket pricing was handled. Prices appeared to jump from £75 to over £300 partway through the booking process, and it was widely reported at the time as “dynamic” or “demand-led” pricing, a model used frequently in the airline and hotel industries, where the price adjusts in real time based on demand.
The backlash was significant enough that the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) opened a formal investigation into Ticketmaster in September 2024. Its finding, published in March 2025, is genuinely surprising given how the episode was reported – Ticketmaster hadn’t actually used dynamic pricing at all.
The real problem was a two-tier pricing structure that wasn’t clearly disclosed, fans queuing for hours weren’t told that the cheaper tier had already sold out, so by the time they reached the front of a very long, very high-pressure queue, the only tickets left were the pricier ones, and it looked to everyone watching like the price itself had moved with demand. Ticketmaster gave undertakings to the CMA to make its pricing tiers and availability clearer going forward.
It’s a useful reminder that the public narrative around a pricing controversy and the actual mechanism behind it aren’t always the same thing, and that “the algorithm did it” is a much more viral story than “the interface didn’t disclose stock levels clearly enough”.
The underlying question is still worth asking, though – does demand-led pricing, when it’s genuinely used, remove the need for touts? If prices already reflect market demand, there’s less room for resale profit, but it also changes the spirit of how live events have traditionally been priced, one that’s aimed at accessibility rather than pure revenue maximisation.
Why Don’t Event Organisers Increase Their Baseline Price?
If demand is so high, why don’t organisers just price tickets closer to what people are willing to pay?
Economist Paul Krugman tackled this question in a 1999 Slate column, “Thinking Outside the Box Office” pointing to a handful of explanations that still hold up:
- Demand Uncertainty: Promoters can’t always predict how popular an event will be. Pricing conservatively ensures a sell-out and avoids the embarrassment, and loss, of empty seats.
- Access and Fairness: Many artists and venues want their events to be accessible to a wide range of fans, not just those with the deepest pockets. Affordable tickets mean greater inclusion.
- Reputation and Signalling: Economist Gary Becker offered a related explanation Krugman cites approvingly, that promoters see a visibly sold-out show as valuable in itself, a signal of demand and status that a half-empty room at a higher price point wouldn’t send, even if the higher price technically raised more revenue.
- Different Business Models: Official sellers operate with long-term reputations and brand relationships in mind, while touts don’t. They’re short-term profiteers with lower costs, no taxes, and fewer rules to follow.
From this perspective, low ticket prices aren’t irrational, they’re strategic. They promote goodwill, maximise merchandise and concession sales, and build brand loyalty, but it also leaves a gap that scalpers can exploit.
Ticket Touting UK Rules – Where Do We Stand?
In the UK, ticket touting itself isn’t illegal, but the market around it is increasingly regulated, and the picture is shifting quite quickly. The 2015 Consumer Rights Act, specifically Section 90, introduced transparency requirements for resale sites – sellers must disclose the seat or standing area, the ticket’s face value, any usage restrictions, and any connection they have to the platform or the original seller.
That’s the baseline that’s existed for a decade. What’s new is a genuine shift toward outright price capping. The Government ran a public consultation on ticket resale reform between January and April 2025, and published its response in November 2025, confirming an intention to introduce a price cap that makes it unlawful to resell a live event ticket for more than its original cost.
A draft Ticket Tout Ban Bill was announced in the May 2026 King’s Speech, and as things stand it remains in draft, subject to pre-legislative scrutiny, not yet law. If it passes broadly as proposed, it would cap resale prices at face value, cap the fees resale platforms can charge on top, ban reselling more tickets than you were originally entitled to buy, and give the CMA power to fine breaches up to 10% of global turnover.
The UK wouldn’t be the first to try this. It’s worth looking at how similar caps have fared elsewhere:
| Jurisdiction | Approach | Cap | Status |
| UK (Current) | Transparency only, no price cap | None, disclosure of seat, face value, and restrictions required | In force since 2015 |
| UK (Proposed) | Hard price cap plus platform duties | Resale at face value, capped service fees | Draft Bill, announced May 2026, not yet law |
| Ireland | Hard price cap for designated events/venues (1,000+ capacity) | Resale at face value | In force since July 2021, fines up to €100,000 or 2 years’ imprisonment |
| Ontario, Canada | Hard price cap, repealed, then reintroduced | Introduced 2017, scrapped in 2019 as “unenforceable,” tightened again via 2025/26 legislation | Currently being reintroduced after a real-world failure |
That Ontario row is doing a lot of work. A resale cap was tried there in 2017, and by 2019 the government had scrapped it, on the grounds that it simply couldn’t be enforced against platforms and individual sellers who found ways around it. Ontario is now trying again with a tighter version. It’s a genuinely useful cautionary tale for the UK’s own draft Bill – writing a cap into law and actually enforcing it against a global secondary market are two different problems, and only one of them gets solved by passing the Bill.
Can the Market Solve This?
Many economists argue that secondary markets are simply a sign of efficient capitalism, goods go to those who value them most. From this view, scalpers aren’t villains, they’re market participants meeting demand.
Despite this, that view doesn’t sit well with most fans, especially when the scalpers’ actions directly restrict access and drive up prices. An efficient market, in this case, doesn’t necessarily mean a fair one.
A potential middle ground lies in improving the official resale process. If ticket holders who genuinely can’t attend could re-list their tickets at a regulated, capped price via an official platform, and organisers took a small share of the resale revenue, both parties could benefit.
This model already exists in part, Twickets has long operated with resale caps, and Ticketmaster closed its own resale sites, GetMeIn and Seatwave, in favour of a fan-to-fan exchange at face value, but it isn’t universal or consistently enforced across the industry.
Another option is digital ticketing tied to identity, limiting transferability and thereby restricting scalping. Some festivals and sports events have begun implementing this, though it brings its own challenges around privacy, lost phones, and what happens when someone genuinely can’t attend and has no legitimate way to pass their ticket on.
Given Ontario’s experience with a cap that looked sound on paper and proved hard to police in practice, I’d treat any of these as a genuine improvement on the status quo rather than a complete fix. Enforcement, not legislation, is usually where these schemes actually live or die.
My Personal Experience
I’ll admit I’ve been burned by touting before. Back in 2015, I tried to get tickets for the England vs Australia rugby match at Twickenham. Face value was £75. Within minutes, those same tickets were listed on resale sites for between £627 and £1,999. I was priced out, and I wasn’t alone.
That kind of markup doesn’t feel like market efficiency. It feels like profiteering. And it leaves a sour taste, not just because I missed the game, but because the experience of live sport, music, and culture should feel inclusive, not exclusive.
Can We Do Better?
The UK live events industry is worth billions and has cultural significance far beyond its financial value, but if genuine fans are consistently locked out in favour of those with faster bots or deeper wallets, trust in the system erodes.
Solving ticket touting isn’t easy. It’s tied up in economic theory, evolving technology, legal frameworks, and cultural expectations, but there’s a real test case coming. The UK’s draft Ticket Tout Ban Bill is, in effect, a bet that a face-value cap can be enforced here where Ontario’s first attempt at the same idea wasn’t.
Whether it works will come down to the unglamorous parts, platform compliance, cross-border enforcement, and whether a 10% global turnover fine is actually large enough to change a resale platform’s behaviour, not the headline promise of the Bill itself.
With a combination of smarter pricing strategies, stronger enforcement of resale transparency, improved fan-to-fan exchange tools, and a price cap that’s actually enforced rather than just legislated, we might just start to reclaim the live event experience for the people it was intended for: the fans, because after all, this is what it is all about.