Written submission from Live Nation Entertainment (LMI0037)
Business and Trade Select Committee Inquiry into
Competition and market functioning in the UK live music industry
Submission from Live Nation Entertainment – January 2026
Live Nation Entertainment, comprising Live Nation and Ticketmaster, promotes and produces live shows and sells tickets. We bring events to life, helping artists throughout their careers connect with their fans.
Summary
Live events are central to British culture, our creative industries, and global reputation. They bring people together, create lasting memories, and sustain a thriving creative economy – supporting more than 230,000 jobs. The UK live music sector is among the most competitive and vibrant in the world. In 2025, live music reached record levels nationwide, with more shows in more towns and cities than ever before.
Demand for live events remains strong, delivering significant economic growth in the UK. In 2024, LIVE’s annual UK Live Music report found that consumer spending driven by the live music industry exceeded £6 billion – a year-on-year increase of nearly 10% and a 30% rise since 2022.
The industry’s 10% growth over the past decade has been driven by sustained investment in artists, venues, touring infrastructure, and new markets. In the UK, Live Nation more than doubled its activity in this time, helping expand the market and deliver live events to 8 million fans across 200 towns and 700 venues featuring 1,500 artists in 2024.
Live Nation isn’t just investing; it is growing the market – delivering more live music to more people in more places, creating more opportunities for artists, and supporting venues nationwide. For today’s artists, live performance is their livelihood: they typically retain about 85% of net show revenues, compared with roughly 16% of recorded music royalties from streaming.[1]
Live Nation
Live Nation promotes and produces shows in venues of all sizes, hosts festivals across the UK, and works with both emerging artists and global superstars. Like all promoters, we make significant upfront investments at considerable risk – covering venue hire, artist guarantees, and production – before a single ticket is sold.
Live Nation-promoted events deliver meaningful economic benefits to local communities and provide employment for more than 1,000 staff across the UK (excluding seasonal hires). Live music generates additional spending on local restaurants, hotels, transport, and suppliers; in 2024 this wider effect contributed an estimated £1.7 billion to the UK economy.
Live Nation does not own or operate any of the UK’s largest arenas or stadiums, except for Cardiff International Arena, which ranks 15th by total capacity. Alongside other global vertically integrated operators such as AEG, CTS Eventim, and ATG, the UK also benefits from a strong and growing network of independent promoters, ticketing agents and venue operators, creating intense competition at every level.
Live music promotion carries significant financial risk; over 90% of shows do not sell out, and around a quarter of Live Nation’s shows in 2024 made a loss. However, artists remain shielded from this as they typically receive guaranteed fees, as is industry practice. Promotion margins are limited – at Live Nation, they are below 3%, compared with approximately 8% for a typical UK PLC.
Investment in grassroots music is essential to nurturing the next generation of talent. Live Nation supports artists at every stage of their careers – from their first gig to stadium shows. More than a third of the artists Live Nation promotes are early-career – twice as many as in 2018 – and nearly 75% perform in grassroots venues. In 2024, 63% of support acts on Live Nation UK shows were British talent.
Ticketmaster
Ticketmaster provides access to live events of all sizes across the UK, spanning music, sport, theatre, and cultural events.
Ticketmaster UK employs around 700 people nationwide (excluding seasonal hires). We maintain a large in-house team of engineers, product developers, cybersecurity experts, and data analysts in London, with a particular focus on security, platform reliability, and user experience. We also offer apprenticeships and early-career pathways to bring new talent into the sector.
Our technology delivers secure ticketing and efficient venue entry, with active measures to counter touts and bots, helping ensure tickets reach genuine fans. Since 2018, Ticketmaster has operated a capped resale service in the UK, allowing fans to sell tickets at or below the original price paid – a position the UK Government has recently decided should become the industry standard by law.
Response
1) Market structure and competition
Event promotion
Artists are the live music business, and promoters work for them – helping them set the terms and economics of their performances. Artists choose which promoter(s) to work with for each show or tour. This creates a highly competitive environment in which promoters compete on a tour-by-tour or show-by-show basis to offer the best service and execution to win that business.
While promoters advise artists and their teams on pricing using market insights, the final decision always rests with artists and their teams. Across tours, artists typically receive the majority of net show revenues – around 85% on average, with many taking an even larger share – reflecting that the show is theirs and that they are paid accordingly.
Estimating the market share of any industry player, including Live Nation, is inherently difficult and subject to significant year-by-year fluctuations, depending on which artists are touring and which promoter(s) they choose to work with. As there is no central dataset and the market varies widely by artist, genre, scale, and year, any single figure would be an unreliable reflection of the industry and market share.
Our competitors include international promoters such as AEG Presents, TEG, and CTS Eventim, as well as UK promoters including Kilimanjaro (owned by DEAG), Marshall Arts, DHP, and SJM. Many major artists who recently toured the UK, including Radiohead, Katy Perry, and Sam Fender, did not work with Live Nation.
Festivals
The festival sector also reflects this competitive reality. Live Nation owns or operates, in full or in part, 26 festivals in the UK (based on the PRS For Music definition), representing less than 5% of UK festivals. Festival ownership and operation are diverse across the sector, with competitors such as AEG, Superstruct, and DHP following the same business structure, alongside hundreds of independents.
Festivals are key events in the UK’s cultural calendar, drawing thousands of music fans and boosting local businesses and jobs. Through ours, we are proud to work closely with local partners to support grassroots talent and sustainability initiatives that create seasonal employment and invest in local infrastructure.
One example is the UK’s premier showcase for rising talent, The Great Escape, run by Live Nation. Since 2006, it has helped launch the careers of acts such as Adele, Ed Sheeran, Charli XCX, Sam Fender and Stormzy. In 2025, the festival featured over 550 artists and 750 performances across 30 small venues in Brighton, spotlighting artists from over 40 countries.
Venues
The UK’s top five grossing venues, as reported by Pollstar in their 2025 year-end report are listed below. Live Nation does not own or operate any of them.
Venue | Owner | Operator |
The O2 | AEG | AEG |
The OVO Hydro | SEC | SEC |
The AO Arena (Manchester Arena) | Mansford | Legends Global (AEG until August 2024) |
Co-Op Live | OVG (co-ownership) | OVG |
Wembley Stadium | The FA | The FA |
Of the 29 stadiums and arenas in the UK, Live Nation owns one arena, Cardiff International Arena, with a capacity of 7,500 – the smallest of 15 arenas regularly used for live music.
The table below shows an estimated total number of venues in the UK by category and outlines our share of these.
Venue category | Total number in the UK | LN Owned or Operated | Share |
Stadium (capacity over 23,500) |
14 |
0 |
0% |
Arenas (capacity between 7,500 and 23,500) |
15 |
1 |
6.66% |
Grassroots venues* (capacity below 7,500) |
800+ |
22 |
2.75% |
*There is no central database that tracks the number of smaller venues with a capacity of less than 7,500. The closest estimation is from the Music Venue Trust, which lists 800+ venues across the UK
Where Live Nation–promoted shows happen (2024)
Venue ownership
Our owned & operated venue estate
Ticketing
Across the industry, ticketing agents, including Ticketmaster, are instructed by their clients (venues, promoters, etc.) on ticket quantities, prices, and onsale timing. Ticketmaster does not set prices; artists and their teams make those decisions, often supported by our tools. Ticketmaster also does not use algorithmic or surge (“dynamic”) pricing or differential pricing based on purchaser characteristics or behaviour.
Ticket prices do not change from the time a customer selects available tickets until they complete their purchase. Artist teams may adjust prices after onsale, most often reducing prices when events have not sold out. Perceived increases usually reflect that lower‑priced tickets have sold out first, leaving only higher‑priced tickets available. That impression is amplified when the event is in extremely high demand, with tickets selling out very quickly.
Service fees have remained relatively flat since 2015, differing by around 1% over nearly a decade, and are usually shared with clients. Despite rising costs, in 2024, the average per-ticket service fee paid by a fan was 10.5% of the ticket’s face value. This is much lower than the fees charged by many online marketplaces, such as Uber (25%), PlayStation (30%), and Apple (30%).
The ticketing industry comprises many players, including CTS Eventim, See Tickets (owned by CTS Eventim), AXS (owned by AEG), Ticketek, Fever, Dice (owned by Fever), and others. Like Ticketmaster, nearly all these players are vertically integrated.
Ticketing agents do not publish comprehensive sales figures, so there are no reliable estimates of market share in this industry. The only third-party reports that exist, such as Pollstar, rely on self-reported, selective and incomplete information from promoters, venues, and agents.
Third-party web traffic data may infer approximate market share. Similarweb's 2024 data for primary ticketing websites suggests Ticketmaster UK's website accounted for 29% of all visitors that year.
For the vast majority of live music events in the UK, industry practice dictates that multiple ticketing agents sell tickets for a single event. In 2024, the average number of ticketing agents per show across the industry was 2.33, with 36% of shows using three or more. Venues, particularly arenas, sell most tickets through their own platforms or partners, while promoters get a smaller allocation and usually use several agents to maximise reach.
Typically, the process across the industry in the UK is as follows:
All ticketing agents must compete for tickets; both before an onsale when competing for ticket allocations from venues and promoters, and later during onsales with other agents to attract fans to our websites and apps with customer service, user experience and competitive fees. If one ticketing agent sells faster than another, promoters can reallocate tickets mid‑sale.
Ticketmaster currently partners with seven of the 29 major arenas and stadiums in the UK to sell their venue allocations. These agreements are common across the industry, with the remaining 22 major venues choosing to sell their allocations through their own or other ticketing providers. For example, AEG-owned venues like The O2 typically use AXS to sell their venue allocations – AXS is owned by AEG.
In the UK, working as a venue’s ticketing agent is often misunderstood to mean that only one party can sell tickets for an event. This is not the case. A venue will have a portion of tickets to sell as will the other parties involved, such as the promoter. Ticketmaster UK does not have any exclusivity agreements with venues.
In 2024, more than 60% of tickets sold by Ticketmaster were for events not promoted by Live Nation Entertainment. This shows that both large-scale and independent promoters actively choose Ticketmaster.
2) Barriers to entry and expansion
Overview
Competition is strong across the industry, with new entrants and expanding competitors without significant barriers. Recent examples include OVG’s Co-Op Live Arena and ticketing agent Fever’s growing presence in the UK and globally.
Exclusivity terms
Artists and their teams choose promoters on a show‑by‑show or tour basis, with promoters competing to present the best offer. Many work with multiple promoters across regions, and all arrangements are negotiated individually.
Radius clauses are standard contract terms used across the industry to protect the value of the show and thus legitimate commercial interests, particularly given the significant financial investment and risk promoters commit to when organising shows, including a substantial fixed fee minimum guarantee to the artist.
These clauses ask an artist not to perform another show in a defined area for a short period before or after the event (for example, the same city or region in the weeks around the date), as ticket sales can be impacted if artists perform other shows within the same market in a short period of time. For festivals in particular, artist exclusivity creates diversity in line-ups to meet customer expectations and maximises the event's success.
In many cases, contracts are issued by the artist, via their agent, and are largely non-negotiable. Exclusivity restrictions are discussed on a case‑by‑case basis and compensated for in artist guarantees. Many artist contracts have no radius clause. Where clauses exist, agreements include flexibility to approve additional shows within the radius.
Live Nation also supports emerging talent through limited development deals that provide upfront funding. These are individually negotiated, time‑limited, and designed to nurture careers rather than restrict choice.
Business Structure
Vertical integration is common across the entire economy, including in live music, with competitors including AEG, CTS Eventim, ATG, and, to a lesser extent, DEAG and TAG adopting this model. This structure enhances business viability by allowing revenues from stronger parts of the business to fund investment in other areas, such as tackling fraud or enabling more concerts and tours.
For Live Nation, this approach supports investment in upcoming talent, enabling us to take greater financial risks and create a positive impact for artists and their fans in the UK. Over the past decade, 43% of our shows have featured new artists, helping acts such as Raye, Doja Cat, Yungblud, Charli XCX, and Sleep Token grow from small club gigs to arena tours.
3) Competition Issues
Live Nation and Ticketmaster engage constructively with regulatory reviews. For example, Ticketmaster recently contributed to the 2025 review of the UK secondary ticketing market by the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, and the Department of Business and Trade. An uncapped secondary market drives prices up without adding consumer value; UK secondary prices average more than 50% above the original price. Ticketmaster has voluntarily operated a capped resale service since 2018, and we welcome the Government’s plan to legislate for a resale price cap.
The CMA reviews and, where appropriate, approves proposed ventures. We will continue to cooperate fully with its work.
Conclusion
The UK live entertainment sector is a major contributor to culture and the economy, supporting hundreds of thousands of jobs and enhancing the UK’s international standing. Live music matters more than ever to artists and fans, and the industry enables artists at all levels to reach audiences across a wide range of venues each year.
It is a highly competitive market defined by innovation, service, and consumer protection, with Live Nation and Ticketmaster operating alongside many others structured similarly. We are proud of the role we play and the investments we make.
Real challenges do exist for the whole sector, including rising costs, ticket touting, increasing tax pressures and complex visa systems – but not ineffective competition. Ongoing collaboration between industry and government is essential to protect fans and keep the UK a global leader in live entertainment.
Live Nation UK is a member of the Concert Promoters Association (CPA)
Ticketmaster UK is a member of the Society of Ticket Agents and Retailers (STAR)