Written submission from Which? (LMI0045)

Introduction

Which? is the UK’s consumer champion. We provide direct advice to consumers, conduct research to understand consumer attitudes, and identify solutions that drive better outcomes in sectors across the economy. We have long-standing concerns regarding consumer harm in ticketing markets, and since the early 2000s we have campaigned on issues such as hidden fees, transparency, dynamic pricing and issues with the secondary ticketing market.

Which? welcomes the opportunity to submit written evidence to the Business and Trade Committee’s inquiry into competition and market functioning in the UK live music industry, following our oral evidence on 4th February 2025 which focused on dynamic pricing. In 2008 we responded to the Competition Commission’s Ticketmaster/Live Nation merger inquiry and argued that the level of vertical integration would lead to higher prices and less choice for fans. Sadly, our fears have not been dispelled in the intervening years and we believe there is sufficient evidence of poor consumer outcomes in this industry to merit a formal investigation by the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA).

Competition among Ticketing Platforms

  1. The sale of tickets for live events appears to be highly concentrated. A small number of companies share the majority of the market, and Ticketmaster has a substantial advantage over its nearest rivals.
  2. The 2008 Competition Commission inquiry into the Ticketmaster/Live Nation merger found that Ticketmaster’s market share at the time was between 40-50% and See Tickets, the next largest supplier, had a market share about half this size. Based on our own primary research with ticket buyers, we suspect that Ticketmaster’s market share may have grown since.
  3. In November 2025 we conducted a nationally representative survey of 2,000 people (unpublished), and found 67% of those who had bought tickets online in the last two years had done so from Ticketmaster.[1] The next most commonly used ticketing platform was Eventbrite, with 34% of respondents having used it. However, we would not consider Eventbrite to be a direct competitor to Ticketmaster, since it offers tickets to smaller, local events.
  4. Amongst direct competitors to Ticketmaster, 19% of people had bought tickets from See Tickets and 15% from AXS. 11% of respondents said they had bought tickets from Eventim, which also owns SeeTickets, while 7% of respondents had used DICE.

Competition in Event Promotion

  1. Event promotion is again largely dominated by a few major companies, with Live Nation (Ticketmaster’s parent company) being the prominent force.
  2. Whilst there is no specific breakdown of the market share of Live Nation and other promoters, our analysis of Pollstar data on live events found that in 2025, out of 4,824 shows that were put on, the top five largest promoters were involved in nearly half of them (2,337).[2] The top 5 in order were Live Nation, DEAG, SJM Concerts, TEG, AEG.
  3. However, judging by the value of tickets sold, we have found that Live Nation, or a subsidiary, is a promoter of over half of the total value. They were responsible for promoting c.£516 million of sales, out of a total of £970 million.

Figure 1

  1. SJM appears to be a close competitor to Live Nation in event promotion, but there are various partnerships and ownership structures that tie these companies together. Simon Moran, the managing director of SJM Concerts, is a director and shareholder at various Live Nation subsidiaries, including DF Concerts and Academy Music Group. The market may be even more concentrated than first appears once these ownership linkages are taken into account.

 

 

Barriers to Competition

  1. Newer or smaller entrants will face the typical challenges of entering this sector such as high costs and the scale of operations needed to put on a live event, especially high value ones.
  2. However, there are some market features that could be particular barriers to competition. For example, venues have longstanding primary ticketing agreements with specific platforms which give these platforms a large allocation of tickets and an exclusive link from the venue website. This might be a critical barrier to preventing smaller ticketing platforms from growing. Our survey found that the top two reasons for choosing a ticketing platform were because they were led there from the event’s official site or it was the publicised official/authorised seller. The inability of even Amazon to successfully enter the UK ticketing market demonstrates the huge barriers that currently exist.
  3. The degree of vertical integration in the industry also has the potential to weaken competition as it creates incentives to crowd out competitors. For example, if a promoter also owns venues, there is an incentive to self-preference the venues when scheduling tours. Further, if the same promoter also owns a ticketing platform, they could then ensure that the majority of the allocations go to that platform.

 

Consumer experience of ticketing platforms

  1. Our research in November 2025 found that the public do not believe they have much choice between ticketing platforms. Nearly half (49%) of people in our survey who had bought tickets in the past two years felt they had no choice or very little choice when choosing a ticketing provider. 29% said they had some choice and only 6% said they had a lot of choice.
  2. A majority (79%) told us they felt prices have increased too much since they had started buying tickets online, and people are particularly concerned about additional fees. Our analysis of ticket prices at 30 events found that additional fees constituted an average of between 9% and 24% of the ticket price depending on the platform. 51% of respondents who had bought event tickets told us they thought the additional fees applied to tickets for events they attend were unfair, while 54% said additional fees had discouraged them from buying tickets.[3]
  3. We also found that satisfaction with ticketing platforms is not positively correlated with market share. Despite its small market share, DICE has the highest levels of satisfaction among its users, while Ticketmaster has the lowest levels among primary sellers.[4]
  4. Finally, we believe the problems arising from Ticketmaster’s sale of Oasis tickets reflects that when there is little competition and limited ability for consumers to exercise choice then this can lead to worse consumer experiences. Ticketmaster sold a majority share of the tickets for this tour[5], but there were serious legal concerns about Ticketmaster’s potentially misleading labelling of ‘platinum’ tickets and its failure to inform customers waiting in a lengthy queue that the price of tickets might be higher than expected because tranches of standing tickets were sold with different prices.

 

Regulatory Recommendation

  1. Our research shows the sector is not working well for music fans and leading to huge consumer dissatisfaction when it comes to price, choice and fairness.
  2. This market has not been subject to serious scrutiny in the UK since the Competition Commission cleared the merger between Ticketmaster and Live Nation more than 15 years ago, which we criticised at the time.
  3. We acknowledge that the CMA has a broad remit and must make difficult prioritisation decisions, however we think that the potential concerns in this market are sufficiently extensive that a case could be opened under the markets regime. Only the CMA with its formal information-gathering powers is able to determine whether and to what extent consumers may be suffering harm in this market due to adverse effects on competition.

 

 

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[1] Survey conducted by Yonder with 2,000 UK adults in November 2025. From this sample, 1,047 adults had bought a ticket online in the last two years.

[2] Pollstar data (unpublished) is based on box office reporting so it may not capture all the events that happened in 2025 if the box office for a specific venue decided not to report their sales.

[3] These additional fees will be more transparent if platforms are compliant with the ‘drip pricing’ requirements in the Digital Markets. Competition and Consumer Act 2024. However, fans still won’t feel they are fair if they are concerned about the purpose and scale of the additional fees.

[4] Net satisfaction was +81 for DICE (n=78), +78 Eventbrite (n=361), +76 Eventim (113), +75 SeeTickets (198), +67 AXS (159), and +53 for Ticketmaster (n=714).

[5] The exact share is not publicly available, but the CMA states that Ticketmaster sold more than 900,000 tickets during the Oasis ticket sale and the BBC reported that more than 1.4 million tickets were on sale when the tour was first announced. Further dates were added, but the figures available indicate Ticketmaster likely had an allocation in excess of 60%.