Last year, the CMA launched an investigation into Ticketmaster after widespread complaints about the sale of Oasis concert tickets last year.  It has now issued an update about the investigation.

The CMA's concerns

Ticketmaster sold more than 900,000 tickets during the Oasis ticket sale.  The CMA is concerned that it may have breached consumer protection law by:

• Labelling certain seated tickets as 'platinum' and selling them for nearly 2.5 times the price of equivalent standard tickets, without sufficiently explaining that they did not offer additional benefits and were often located in the same area of the stadium. This risked giving consumers the misleading impression that platinum tickets were better.
• Not informing consumers that there were two categories of standing tickets at different prices, with all the cheaper standing tickets sold first before the more expensive standing tickets were released.  This meant that many fans waited in a lengthy online queue without understanding what they would be paying and then having to decide whether to pay a higher price than they expected.

Many fans believed that Ticketmaster used an algorithmic pricing model during the Oasis sale, with ticket prices adjusted in real time according to changing conditions like high demand. The CMA has not found evidence that this was the case. Instead, Ticketmaster released a number of standing tickets at a lower price and, once they had sold out, then released the remaining standing tickets at a much higher price.

Although prices were not adjusted in real time using an algorithm, the CMA is concerned that consumers were not given clear and timely information about how the pricing of standing tickets would work, particularly where many customers had to wait in lengthy queues to see what tickets were available.

Next steps

Since the CMA started its investigation, Ticketmaster has made changes to some aspects of its ticket sales process, but the CMA does not currently consider these changes are sufficient to address its concerns.  

The CMA has provided Ticketmaster with details of the further steps required to address its concerns and is seeking changes to Ticketmaster's processes – including to the information it provides to customers, when it provides that information, and how it labels some of its tickets. The CMA is now consulting on these changes with Ticketmaster. 

Secondary ticketing

Separately, the CMA has responded to the government's consultation about secondary ticketing. It referred to its previous advice in 2021. Back in 2021, it recommended legislative changes to prohibit platforms from allowing sellers to list more tickets for an event than the seller can legally buy from the primary market, and to ensure platforms were accountable for incorrect information about tickets listed on their websites. It also said that achieving higher 
standards of compliance – both with its proposals and with consumer law more generally – would require a different approach to enforcement. It recommended a licensing regime for secondary ticketing platforms, overseen by a new regulatory function with dedicated funding.  The previous government rejected these suggestions.

In its latest response, the CMA has said that although the introduction of the DMCC Act will improve consumer enforcement, it will not address the limitations of the underlying law in relation to the ongoing issues in the sector (for example, around the liability of secondary ticketing platforms for the actions of sellers, and clarity about what exactly those platforms should be required to do in terms of policing their users).  Neither will it address the significant barriers to effective enforcement, including the difficulties in swiftly investigating, evidencing, and tackling breaches, particularly where sellers and platforms are located outside the UK.

As a result, the CMA says that its previous 2021 recommendations, taken together, would help to further reduce misleading behaviour and other harmful conduct by resellers and platforms.  It also supports a resale price cap.

It remains to be seen what the UK government will decide to implement.