By August Brown
Publication Date: 2025-11-18 19:18:00
The UK plans to pass one of the world’s most radical anti-ticket scalping measures, banning the resale of music, comedy, theater and sports tickets for profit.
Following an open letter from artists including Dua Lipa, Coldplay, Sam Fender, Radiohead and The Cure urging Prime Minister Keir Starmer to ban the practice, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport will announce a plan to limit ticket resale to face value (with minimal fees).
They estimate the move could reduce ticket prices by around £37 ($49), saving fans around £112 million ($147 million) a year. Fans will still be able to sell tickets to shows they can’t attend, but not by a significant margin.
Ticket prices have been a hot topic in the UK after Oasis’ long-awaited reunion tour highlighted Ticketmaster’s “dynamic pricing” model. While a separate issue from resale, that demand-reactive pricing system showed ticket costs skyrocketing in real time as fans waited in digital lines to buy them.
For those who missed out, they had little choice but to pay inflated prices on third-party resale sites like Viagogo and Stubhub. The UK Competition and Markets Authority then opened an investigation into Ticketmaster’s compliance with consumer protection laws.
UK Housing Secretary Steve Reed he told the BBC that resale for profit was “hugely detrimental to people who had to pay through the nose for tickets.”
Ahead of the announcement, Ticketmaster’s parent company Live Nation Entertainment said it already restricts resale prices in the UK to face value. The company said the proposal was “another big step forward for fans.”
In the US, the company recently established an “all-inclusive” pricing model to be more transparent about its infamous fees, saying that “the industry-leading initiative has proven to be beneficial for both fans and artists, providing greater transparency for fans while increasing sales for artists and fewer abandoned carts at checkout.”
Live Nation is currently facing a wide-ranging federal antitrust lawsuit in the US, alleging monopolistic practices, following heated Senate hearings following the Taylor Swift Eras tour sales debacle. In March, President Trump issued an executive orderr “to protect fans from exploitative ticket exploitation and bring common-sense reforms to the live entertainment ticketing industry in the United States,” and in September the Federal Trade Commission sued Ticketmaster and Live Nation for allegedly engaging in illegal ticketing practices in their resale business.
“American live entertainment is the best in the world and should be accessible to all of us,” FTC Chairman Andrew N. Ferguson said in a statement in September. “It shouldn’t cost an arm and a leg to take the family to a baseball game or see your favorite musician’s show.”
