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For years, buying tickets to a big UK gig has felt less like a transaction and more like a stress test. You refresh the page, watch the seats vanish, and then almost instantly see the same tickets reappear elsewhere at prices drastically inflated.
In mid-November, the UK government confirmed it will introduce strict limits on how much tickets can be marked up on the resale market, making a move that campaigners, artists, and much of the industry have been pushing for the better part of a decade. The decision lands after renewed pressure from across the music business, including UK Music, which has repeatedly warned that unchecked reselling has turned into an economy built on exploiting fans.
The new rules aim to redraw the boundaries of what’s allowed. Once they come into force, tickets for concerts, theater, comedy, sport, and other events won’t be allowed to change more than their original price, aside from a small, tightly controlled admin fee. Platforms that host resales will face limits on the extra charges they can add and will be legally responsible for making sure the rules are actually followed. There will also be restrictions on how many tickets any one person can flip after an initial purchase.
Behind the policy sits a very familiar villain, large-scale operators who use automated software to hoover up huge numbers of tickets the moment they go on sale, only to feed them back onto the market at eye-watering prices. According to government estimates, the changes could save audiences more than £100 million a year.
Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy framed the move as a shift in priorities away from the gray market and back toward ordinary fans. Business Secretary Peter Kyle struck a similar note, arguing that when access to culture is restricted by artificial scarcity and profiteering, only intermediaries win.
The FanFair Alliance, which has spent years building the case against industrial-scale ticket flipping, called the announcement the result of long, patient pressure. But even its supporters are keen to stress that speed matters: every month without reform is another month in which fans keep overpaying.
Ian McAndrew, who works with acts like Arctic Monkeys and Fontaines D.C, described the secondary market as something that’s been warping live music for nearly two decades, turning access to gigs into a speculative sport. From that perspective, the reforms aren’t just consumer protection, but they’re structural repair.
The new framework won’t just apply to the big resale sites. Any platform offering tickets to UK buyers, including social media marketplaces, will fall under the same rules. For companies that ignore them, the penalties could be severe. Under existing digital markets legislation, fines could reach a significant percentage of global turnover.
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