Price of resale tickets to be capped under plans to tackle touts after Oasis fans saw prices soar
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The Government has announced plans to cap the price of resale tickets in a bid to clamp down on touts. A consultation will explore this cap among various options aimed at making ticket-buying fairer for fans. This comes after concert sales for artists like Taylor Swift and Oasis were marred by professional touts reselling tickets at heavily inflated prices.
Some fans were caught out by a lack of transparency over dynamic pricing, which saw the cost of some standard Oasis tickets more than double from £148 to £355 while fans waited in the queue. According to the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), typical mark-ups on tickets sold on the secondary market exceed 50%. Trading Standards investigations have revealed instances of tickets being resold for up to six times their original price.
Research by Virgin Media O2 indicates that ticket touts cost music fans an additional £145m annually. The CMA estimates that the value of tickets sold in 2019 through secondary ticketing platforms was around £350m, with approximately 1.9 million tickets sold on these platforms – about 5% to 6% of the number of primary tickets.
The public consultation will consider opinions on capping resale prices on a range from the original price to up to a 30% uplift, as well as limiting the number of tickets resellers can list to the maximum they are permitted to purchase on the primary market.
