Ticketmaster Agrees to Pricing Transparency After Oasis Tour Investigation
Ticketmaster has agreed to overhaul how it communicates ticket prices after the UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) found it misled fans during last year’s Oasis reunion tour. Many fans queued for hours unaware that standing tickets were split into two pricing tiers, with prices jumping once the cheaper tickets had sold out. Some “platinum” tickets were also sold for nearly 2.5 times the price of standard ones, without offering any added perks. While there were complaints of “dynamic pricing,” the CMA confirmed it found no evidence of prices changing in real time.
As part of the new agreement, Ticketmaster must now notify fans 24 hours in advance if tiered pricing will be used and offer clearer breakdowns of the prices during online queues. That includes showing the full price range and updating fans when lower-priced tickets sell out. The platform will also stop using misleading labels like “platinum” unless there's a clear difference in value, and will submit regular reports to the CMA over the next two years to prove it’s following through.
The changes come amid wider scrutiny of Ticketmaster and its parent company Live Nation, who are facing lawsuits in the US for allegedly allowing brokers to buy up thousands of tickets and resell them at inflated prices.
Responding to the UK findings, a Ticketmaster spokesperson said: "We welcome the CMA's confirmation there was no dynamic pricing, no unfair practices and that we did not breach consumer law. To further improve the customer experience, we've voluntarily committed to clearer communication about ticket prices in queues. This builds on our capped resale, strong bot protection, and clear pricing displays – and we encourage the CMA to hold the entire industry to these same standards."
Fans, meanwhile, hope these reforms will bring more fairness to an unpredictable system that has long been criticized for not being transparent.
