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UK To Ban the Resale of Tickets For Profit To Protect Fans (reuters.com) 116

Posted by msmash from the no-mercy dept.
Britain said on Wednesday it would ban the resale of tickets to concerts, sport and other live events for profit, disrupting ticket touts and the platforms that benefit from their activities. From a report: Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy said touts were ripping off fans by using bots to snap up batches of tickets for coveted shows and reselling them at sky-high prices. "Our new proposals will shut down the touts' racket and make world-class music, comedy, theatre and sport affordable for everyone," she said, after the government had promised action.

UK To Ban the Resale of Tickets For Profit To Protect Fans More | Reply

UK To Ban the Resale of Tickets For Profit To Protect Fans

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  • In practice, scalpers will find workarounds
    Some people actually believe the fiction that governments can effectively stop things by banning them
    All laws do is raise the price and fine or imprison those too incompetent to find good workarounds

    • Re:Great idea in theory (Score:5, Informative)

      by Striek ( 1811980 ) on Wednesday November 19, 2025 @02:49PM (#65805379)

      In practice, scalpers will find workarounds

      They always have. Back in my day (shit I'm getting old), it was illegal to sell tickets for more than the face value where I live, which stopped bulk purchases. You'd still find scalpers outside ball games and concerts trying to make a few bucks off tickets - and I have no problem with that model. It's the wholesale buying up of entire venues I don't like.

    • I don't think it's a good idea, even in theory. What this proposal will ensure is that tickets are very hard to find.

      Imagine Bad Bunny announces a show in your hometown. Tickets sell out in an hour. Now, if you want to go, you have to be watching the Ticketmaster web site like a hawk. A ticket will be listed for sale and immediately be snapped up by some other lucky fan. You've just traded one problem, high prices, with another, a lottery system. What makes you so confident this is better?

      Here's a proposal

      • Re:Great idea in theory (Score:5, Interesting)

        by SomePoorSchmuck ( 183775 ) on Wednesday November 19, 2025 @07:11PM (#65805999) Homepage

        I don't think it's a good idea, even in theory. What this proposal will ensure is that tickets are very hard to find.

        Imagine Bad Bunny announces a show in your hometown. Tickets sell out in an hour. Now, if you want to go, you have to be watching the Ticketmaster web site like a hawk. A ticket will be listed for sale and immediately be snapped up by some other lucky fan. You've just traded one problem, high prices, with another, a lottery system. What makes you so confident this is better?

        Here's a proposal to think about: why is it an either-or? Ticketmaster could experiment with issuing ticket refunds and reselling tickets. They don't need legislation to do that. So we could run an experiment: let people resell tickets and have TM refund and rebuy them. Let's see which is more popular. We both know which will have more traffic.

        Here's the thing. The observed value of the seats is far, far more than the original selling price (because that's what people are actually willing to pay). You could solve that problem by having more shows (yay!) or having artists and venues list tickets for their approximate fair market value. The question you ought to be asking is, why do neither of these happen?

        If we want to see true equilibrium pricing with market forces, how about something like this?

        The event is June 1.
        January 1, tix go on sale from the original promoter for $1000 each, and you get to pick whatever seats you want.
        February 1, the remaining tix go on sale for $500 each, and you get to pick whatever seats you want from what's left.
        March 1, the remaining tix go on sale for $250 each, and you get to pick whatever seats you want from what's left.
        April 1, the remaining tix go on sale for $100 each, and you get to pick whatever seats you want from what's left.
        May 1, the remaining tix go on sale for $50 each, and you get to pick whatever seats you want from what's left.
        May 31, the remaining tix go on sale for $10 each, and you get to pick whatever seats you want from what's left.

        This is effectively a regressive-taxation system, so should be loved by many slashdot regulars.
        Those for whom the event is a fun luxury they can easily afford due to their high wealth, can buy tix early and reserve their favorite seat location. They pay more according to their ability.
        Scalpers have no incentive to scoop up tix for two reasons:
        1) the initial retail price is so high that there's no margin to make in reselling.
        2) Unless a single scalper can afford to buy up an entire 30,000 seat arena at $1000 each, there WILL be seats left and thus prices WILL continue come down in the future. In other words, prices rise because of competition in the demand side. With this time-decay price structure, scalpers aren't competing with other scalpers (and fans) for the resale margins, but you are forcing scalpers to compete against their future selves. The tickets their bots harvest today WILL depreciate in value. There's no longer any point to harvest-and-hold tix.

        Additionally, this will allow every participant - artists, promoters, venues, fans, casual observers on slashdot - to finally learn exactly what the real market value is for a given event. There will be an obvious bell-distribution graph where the most ticket movement happened. Everyone will actually have to decide both what price point is worth it for them AND what risk level they can tolerate if they wait until the next price drop and that's also everyone else's price point. THAT price point where the big collective moves happen -- that's a great approximation of your true equilibrium price.

        As a benefit, this makes the top-dollar events more reasonable AND makes the smaller events more lucrative to the promoters and artists.
        1) Prestige mainstream events like Beyonce and Swift will still always sell 80% in the first couple months, and then the medium-tail trickle to the nosebleed sections in months 3 and 4.
        2)

        • If we want to see true equilibrium pricing with market forces, how about something like this?

          The event is June 1.
          January 1, tix go on sale from the original promoter for $1000 each, and you get to pick whatever seats you want.
          February 1, the remaining tix go on sale for $500 each, and you get to pick whatever seats you want from what's left.

          ...pretty reasonable seeming system elided...

          That seems like a quite reasonable thing. Here's the question though: what's stopping artists, venues, and promoters from doing that today? I think there's absolutely no barrier and if you could come up with this idea, I'm sure someone at Bill Graham Presents already did.

          There's a concept called a Chesterson's Fence [fs.blog]. You're walking along (probably in New England) and find a stone fence. Before you remove it, it behooves you to ask "who put this fence here and why?" Perhaps the fence serves a useful purpose

  • What I've never understood is why, if a scalper can sell a ticket for $1000, the venue sells that same ticket (to the scalper) for $100.

    If the ticket is actually worth $1000, why wouldn't the venue sell it for that amount themselves?

    • Agreed, and that's a part of the same news story. The popular nineties Beatles cover-act Oasis tried to leave less of that money on the table for touts or scalpers to help themselves to. Some people hated the redulting high ticket prices, the media got all over it, and that response was a contributor to this current legal change. Contemporary source: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/art... [bbc.co.uk]

    • What I've never understood is why, if a scalper can sell a ticket for $1000, the venue sells that same ticket (to the scalper) for $100.

      If the ticket is actually worth $1000, why wouldn't the venue sell it for that amount themselves?

      A $1,000 ticket better come with a guaranteed blowjob from the artist. I don't care who the fuck it is, there is ZERO chance any ticket to a concert or performance of some kind is worth $!,000. I wouldn't even pay that for a three day event.

      • I'd pay $1000 for a ticket, depending on what the ticket was too.

        I am not gonna pay just to listen to someone sing, except MAYBE Sarah Brightman.

        Having seen it, I would pay $1000 to see "O", as it was the best production I've ever been to. But I would probably not pay that much before having seen it. As it was, I paid about $300 each for our tickets.

        I paid around $1000 for my wife to see Adele in Las Vegas, because she really wanted to go. She had a good time. I didn't double down on that by going with her

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by davidwr ( 791652 )

        >A $1,000 ticket better come with ...

        I'd settle for the ticket coming with a signed album of their latest gold record, but only if the record was made of real gold and the gold content was worth at least $1000.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by sabri ( 584428 )

        A $1,000 ticket better come with a guaranteed blowjob from the artist.

        Ozzy Osbourne will rise from the grave for you.

    • Because many artists actually like their fans and want to give them all a chance to attend, rather than extracting the maximum profit from them and restricting it to only really rich people. Plus charging $5000 for a Taylor Swift ticket is a bad look even if they would sell out. This model used to work fine when ticket sales were in person, where some of the cost of buying tickets was time, effort, etc. and could have better verification that it's an actual person. That deterred most large-scale scalping

      • Right, so it's the artists that enable scalpers, by underpricing their product.

        Here is a reality for you. Even if "bots" were 100% eliminated and each and every ticket were "manually" purchased by someone, scalpers would still flourish.

        Why?

        Because demand will always exceed supply.

        If I can buy two $100 tickets, knowing full well that some fool will pay $2000/each for them, of COURSE I'm going to pursue that opportunity!

        And why is some fool going to pay $2000 each for those tickets? Because only 10,000 (or wh

    • If the ticket is actually worth $1000, why wouldn't the venue sell it for that amount themselves?

      That's a great question, one which should have good answers before enacting legislation. I can suggest a few.

      First, reputation. Artists don't want to be seen as profit hungry bandits. If Beyonce sold seats at $1,000 for nosebleed seats, a lot of her fans would be alienated. She has plausible deniability if she retails them for a mere $500.

      Second, risk. The venue doesn't want seats to go empty. If they underprice tickets, they guarantee themselves a predictable amount of income.

      Third, buzz. If tickets origin

      • If the ticket is actually worth $1000, why wouldn't the venue sell it for that amount themselves?

        That's a great question, one which should have good answers before enacting legislation. I can suggest a few.

        First, reputation. Artists don't want to be seen as profit hungry bandits. If Beyonce sold seats at $1,000 for nosebleed seats, a lot of her fans would be alienated. She has plausible deniability if she retails them for a mere $500.

        Second, risk. The venue doesn't want seats to go empty. If they underprice tickets, they guarantee themselves a predictable amount of income.

        Third, buzz. If tickets originally sold for $500 and now are going for $1,000, it must be a good show, right?

        Fourth, who says the venue doesn't sell them for $1,000? I bought some tickets over the last year and Ticketmaster was happy to let me resell them on their site, for a cut of the action, of course. They make a ton of money if tickets change hands many times so it's somewhat in their interest to let party A buy the ticket for $100 then resell it for $1,000.

        I guarantee you lots of smart people have run the numbers and know ticket pricing strategies which incorporate all these effects. I further guarantee they've thought about it a lot more than you and I combined.

        Good points. They seem to run well with my just-came-up-with-it proposal for an auto-depreciating ticket market: https://news.slashdot.org/comm... [slashdot.org]

        But especially to your second point, perhaps the best outcome of a price-decay system is for the venues. Because one of the problems with the current bot-scalping industry is that sometimes events "sell out" in terms of tickets, but actual attendance is below capacity. That means we have both inefficient allocation of resources and lost revenue from the alcohol/co

  • so ... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by oshkrozz ( 1051896 ) on Wednesday November 19, 2025 @02:11PM (#65805235)
    I sadly actually read the article and it addressed (not at all) where my mind went. What about fees?
    Just some assurance that it will be "reasonable" basically Ticketmaster is protected, they get the fees from person A, then get to charge more fees to person B.
    The correct title is UK proposes making sure Ticketmaster profits are protected in banning others from profiting off reselling tickets.

  • Which is the bot-driven sales. Followed by commission sales agents enabling the process.

    I may never see another major act in person. Just don't want to participate in the fraud.

  • Selling commemorative T-Shirt for Bon Jovi (Score:3)

    by PackMan97 ( 244419 ) on Wednesday November 19, 2025 @02:18PM (#65805261)
    Hi Slashdot, I have a commemorative plain white T-Shirt for sale in honor of Bon Jovi's concert at Wembley next year. One of a kind. Asking $2,500. Will throw in two free tickets to the concert. Thank you.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      If the $ sign didn't give you away, the assumption that the law works like that did. The UK is not the US, the law doesn't allow you to get around the wording like that. Courts generally interpret the intention of the law, and look for ways for it to practically implement that intention.

      Such obvious fraud would be, well, fraud.

  • All tickets were gone in minutes and put up at 10x prices later. Some people started joking that they'd have to remortgage their house to buy one.

    • All that means is that the prices should have been set for at least 10x to begin with.

      • No. It means that:
        1. Bots should be effectively stopped.
        2. Tickets should be distributed using either first-come-first-serve principle...
        3. ...or by random allocation. i.e. a ballot.

  • This is advantage of getting old.
    Anyone I’d be interested in are either retired or dead.

  • I realize, it's a hard problem, but maybe a government can help in general with clamping down on bots, it seems they cause a lot of problems, not just in ticket markets.

    Maybe governments could issue bot licences, then when they see an unlicensed bot, or a bot doing something outside the scope of its license they can at least try to remedy, either technical or legal (or military !)

    • I wonder if there is a way to keep track of a purchase being made by a connection to a particular website. If so, I don't see why they couldn't track the time taken to make one or more purchases, and deny it automatically if under a particular threshold.

      Sure, bot makers could just adjust for it, but at some point they would adjust the time taken by the bot by so much that they would absolutely lose that speed advantage bots have to humans, IMO leveling the playing field dramatically.

    • I realize, it's a hard problem, but maybe a government can help in general with clamping down on bots,

      I want to implement a BuyBot. Do I need a license for that?

  • Concerts are a luxury. If someone richer or more devoted than you wants to pay more for a ticket then you don't get one.
    Tickets should be sold in a reverse auction. The price starts high on the first day of sales and drops to basically the admin cost of the ticket when the concert starts.
    But their are people who feel they should be entitled to have a chance to buy a good ticket for the price they want to pay even if it is less than what someone else would pay. This entitled attitude leads to perfor

    • That's exactly it!

      Entitled people who feel they should be able to get the ticket they want, at the price they want, regardless of what anyone else is willing to pay for it. That's the real problem, right there.

  • In Canada Ticketmaster sells a lot (most) of the event tickets to their other company that resells the tickets. This cuts out the performer from their ticket revenue and of course makes it more expensive for the people that want to go. I'm not sure how this isn't scalping, and I thought that was always illegal. I remember when sports and concerts were inexpensive or at least reasonable. My only solution to the conundrum is to never go to anything. It is weird that something like Hockey, which was chara

    • I have always thought event tickets were high priced and avoided them.

      I don't think I went to one until well into my 30s....possibly even my 40s, when I felt like I had "money to blow on stupid shit".

      • Yes, I hear you. But it shouldn't be this way. I guess the world has changed a fair bit. For me a company selling tickets to another company that they own as their own middleman should simply be fraud. I'm fine with not going, I just want it to be my idea.

    • you used to be able to go the box office and skip the fees

      • you used to be able to go the box office and skip the fees

        This is probably the biggest sign that the entire price scheme is distorted beyond all reality.
        It is now customary to have an $8-$15 "processing fee" when all the processing is done by a smaller team of humans managing an automated system, whereas 40 we paid zero dollars in "processing fees" when there was actual processing being done by 20,000 actual human beings across the country who each got paid to sit at a desk all day and hand you tangible paper tickets.

        Now that I think about it that way, on its curr

  • So it won't work anyway.
    12 years olds unable to go to a Taylor Swift concert because they don't have a driving license would be rioting in the streets.

    • So, this is about the UK, a country where ID is usually quite common since people do take vacation outside of their own.

      In the netherlands, ID is necessary at 12 for public transport or health/hospitals, and are 'obliged' to carry one at 14. (of course, nobody *does*, but...)
      The UK doesn't have such laws, but it's not that weird.

  • Because I moderate a comment up instead of down

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