Earlier this month, I was 500th in the infamous virtual Ticketmaster queue for Olivia Rodrigo’s Unraveled Tour at the O2. By everyone around me at the time, that should have been fine. The O2’s capacity is 20,000, there was no reason why I should not get tickets. Five minutes later, I got through to the ticket page, card ready, eager to buy - and there were only two tickets left in the entirety of the O2. VIP standing tickets at £308 each.
The ‘Ticketmaster war’ is an experience that will feel all too familiar to anyone who has tried to buy a ticket to a major show in the last few years: Taylor Swift, Ariana Grande, Bruno Mars, and Oasis come to mind. The queue, the waiting room, the subconscious sense that something has already gone wrong before you can even checkout. My experience with Olivia Rodrigo’s concert made me want to explore what actually happened between the time of the sale opening and my place in the queue being reached. What is even more frustrating is that within minutes of the general sale opening, the same tickets were appearing on websites such as Viagogo and StubHub for well over £400. It felt like being robbed in slow motion as I sat helplessly in the queue, except for the fact that nobody had technically done anything illegal. This raised the question: why does this keep happening? Every major tour, every major artist has the same story. Queues that are meaningless, tickets that vanish, and a resale market that pops up almost before the original sale has closed. Is it just bad luck? Poor planning? Or is something more systematic going on?
Before diving into the economics behind this market, it’s worth defining the different factors of the market. A ticket tout is someone who buys tickets with the intention of reselling them at a profit, either individually, or by using bots, which use an automated software that can purchase tens of tickets in the time it takes a real fan to go through checkout. In the UK, the 2017 Digital Economy Act made it illegal to use bots to bulk-buy tickets, however the enforcement of this law is slack and the practice continues. The secondary market, which includes platforms like Viagogo and StubHub act as sites where the tickets are resold. The resale prices on these websites reflect the true equilibrium price, where supply and demand actually balance, as on the primary market, the event seller and the artists work together to set a maximum price for accessibility. These price ceilings result in excess demand as more people want to buy at the capped price than there are tickets available. The massive queues aren’t all bots, the massive numbers reflect the consequence of pricing tickets below what the market would naturally clear at.
To understand why tickets disappear in seconds, we have to remember that supply is fixed. The O2 holds around 20,000 people, and this capacity doesn’t change no matter how many fans want to attend, making the supply curve perfectly inelastic - a vertical line that cannot shift regardless of price or demand. In any ordinary market, high demand would signal to the producers to make more output to meet these demands to maximise profits. In the concert market, that is just not possible.
On the demand side, demand is anything but fixed. Demand for global sensations is enormous, and highly inelastic (quantity demand is not sensitive to changes in price) for devoted fans. This means that fans are willing to pay significantly above face value than go without. The price elasticity of demand for these concert tickets is inelastic as the tickets aren’t easily substitutable, as there is only one Olivia Dean or one Taylor Swift. The resale market capitalises on the desperate fan’s consumer surplus (the gap between what the fan is willing to pay and what they actually pay). The resellers are aware of the size of the consumer surplus and that fact results in the extortionate prices seen on Viagogo and StubHub, which led to people during the Era’s Tour spending thousands on tickets.
The use of bots in the ticket reselling industry is a frustration shared by all ordinary fans. The automated software used can complete hundreds of ticket purchases in the time that it takes a human to solve the CAPTCHA test. By the time you reach the front of the queue, a significant portion of the allocation may already be gone. This industry shows market failure driven by imperfect information, or information asymmetry. Bots give the resellers a technological advantage, distorting what should be the fair, first-come-first-served system into a system rigged in favour of whoever has the best software.
The UK government’s Digital Economy Act of 2017 made the use of these bots that were bulk-buying tickets illegal - a move which in theory, was rational. However, in practice, the enforcement of this act has been very difficult for a number of reasons: bots are hard to detect, operate internationally, and evolve at a faster rate than regulation can keep up.
However, bots aren’t the ones setting the resale value at 5-10 times the face value price, price ceilings are. Face value ticket prices are set well below the market equilibrium, which guarantees excess demand regardless of who is buying. Artists and venues set face value prices below equilibrium for understandable reasons - to keep tickets accessible, to maintain goodwill with fans, to avoid the reputational damage of being seen to charge £300 for a concert ticket. But in doing so, they create a shortage which then finds another outlet, which, in this case, is the secondary market. The price ceiling intended to protect fans ends up producing the very resale problem that harms them.
Another controversial factor that leads to higher ticket prices is dynamic pricing, which is when platforms like Ticketmaster of AXS adjust ticket prices in real time based on demand, essentially charging closer to the true market rate whilst decreasing consumer surplus. This is what happened with the Oasis reunion tour in 2024, when fans who joined the queue at one price found themselves facing significantly higher charges by the time they reached checkout without being warned in advance. Economically, dynamic pricing is logical: it closes the gap between face value and equilibrium, reducing the profit margin available to resellers and theoretically making the resale market less attractive however; it does so by transferring the surplus from resellers to Ticketmaster and the artist, not to fans, which doesn't improve accessibility.
Solutions to this issue aren’t perfect. A softer intervention is the fan-to-fan resale cap, used by platforms like Twickets, which limits resale to face value. This preserves accessibility and removes the financial incentive to resell. The problem is enforcement: nothing stops a seller from taking cash on the side, and determined touts simply move to unregulated platforms. The most radical solution is paperless, ID-locked ticketing - where tickets are tied to the buyer's identity and cannot be transferred, effectively killing the secondary market entirely. Taylor Swift's Eras Tour used a version of this in some markets. The downside to this solution is the inflexibility: fans who actually can't attend lose the ability to sell on their ticket at any price, or if the tickets were gifts.
In conclusion, the concert ticket market is a perfect example of a market where there is fixed supply, inelastic demand, a maximum price, and a secondary market capitalising on consumer surplus. Although the resale market is frustrating, the harder question is what the alternative looks like. If artists charged true market rate, £300, £400, or whatever the equilibrium price actually is, the resale market would largely collapse. Resellers would have no consumer surplus to exploit. However, those tickets would be unaffordable for most fans, and the artists who built their fanbases on accessibility would price out the people who got them onto the stage.
Emily Jong