PARLIAMENTARY DEBATE
Dynamic Ticket Pricing - 10 September 2024 (Commons/Commons Chamber)

I welcome the Minister to his place and very much look forward to working with him to promote our world-class creative industries, including our music industry and all the other fantastic sectors that his Department promotes.

Today, I want to talk about music ticketing and recognise the remarkable circumstances that have provoked this debate. News of the Oasis reunion has dominated the news cycle for the last week or so, but some might say for all the wrong reasons. What should have been a moment to celebrate one of the UK’s most significant cultural exports—and the chance to revisit the music that, for many, me included, was the soundtrack to our youth—has morphed into a conversation about exploitative practices in the music industry that hurt fans and the grassroots sector. Some of the issues have been rumbling away for years. In fact, earlier this year, the Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport published a report on grassroots music that outlined some of the major challenges facing the live music ecosystem and suggested some ways forward.

The Minister knows the facts. On 31 August, some 14 million people from 158 countries logged on to a digital queue to buy tickets to the Oasis Live 25 reunion tour, 15 years after the band broke up and 30 years on from their seminal first album, “Definitely Maybe”. Fans were locked in an online queue for up to 10 hours and, when many of them, it seemed almost at random, made it to the front of the queue, the tickets were in many cases more than double the price that had been advertised. The dynamic pricing mechanism employed by Oasis, their promoters and management via Ticketmaster served to increase the price of tickets in line with demand, but in reality it resulted in a kind of lucky dip game in which the price got worse and worse by no clear mechanism except the secret and opaque rules of a computer algorithm in the hands of Ticketmaster.

I should declare an interest: after four hours of queuing, I had become wistful about the halcyon days of real-life physical box offices, where we queued almost overnight to get our tickets, but at least we could see the queue in front of us and we knew how long we would have to wait.

I commend the hon. Member for bringing this debate. She is right and many of my constituents experienced the issue that she mentions. We understand the economic principles of supply and demand, but we also understand the principle of price gouging. For those who believed they would be charged one price to have just a few moments to decide whether they would be prepared to pay double is unfair pressure. We must always encourage free trade, but we must also be mindful of consumer protection in Strangford, Gosport or any part of this United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

I could not have said it better myself—that is exactly what it is. We understand the laws of supply and demand, but we also understand the laws of transparency and fairness. What is more, once ticket purchasers were through to the payment screen, fans realised that they only had a very limited time to decide whether the hugely inflated prices were worth paying. Someone compared the ticket purchase after such a long wait to the dopamine rush of a gambler. The £150 to £400 price increase meant that the transaction was no longer a choice, but more of an impulse buy.

I have heard many people say that the dynamic pricing method is used effectively in other sectors, and that the technology is a perfect demonstration of the dynamism of a free market. Even within the music industry itself, there is dispute as to whether dynamic pricing has a place and is an acceptable way forward.

I congratulate the hon. Lady on securing the debate. I was hoping to secure a debate on the subject myself but she beat me to it. There seems to be an issue about who is to blame for all of this—no one is taking responsibility for the issue of dynamic pricing. Ticketmaster is blaming the management and artists, and they are blaming those who were promoting the events. As she is now the Chair of the Culture, Media and Sport Committee, will she look into this on behalf of the House and find out exactly why this has happened, with a view to having it stopped and outlawed entirely?

I am very fortunate to have been re-elected as the Chair of the Culture, Media and Sport Committee, but we do not have any members of the Committee yet. Any decisions about what the Committee will look at will very much be a group decision jointly taken, but this is certainly something I will be putting forward. I know the Minister has already announced some consultation of his own.

To return to dynamic pricing and the laws of supply and demand, mentioned by the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon), this is something that is used across different marketplaces. Uber employs a smart dynamic pricing mechanism that adjusts the cost of journeys in line with changing variables, such as traffic and current rider-to-driver demand. Hotels and airlines are another market that uses dynamic pricing, but they are very different. If people are stuck at Waterloo station, as I sometimes am, an Uber is not the only option of travel and, when people go on holiday, multiple airlines offer flights to the same city and different hotel options, but when it comes to live music, particularly in cases such as this one, there is one artist and one opportunity to buy a ticket.

The imperfections of the dynamic pricing mechanism were obvious to anybody who attempted to buy a ticket on this occasion, but whatever the rights and wrongs of its suitability for music ticketing and this market place, the most important issue is that fans were not warned about the use of dynamic pricing before they entered the digital queue. Those are the faults that led the Competition and Markets Authority to open its investigation into this debacle. It meant that people had no idea how much a ticket would cost when they logged in. Many fans ended up paying at least double the original listing price of £148, so four standing tickets could cost an eye-watering £1,400 once service and order processing fees were included. The CMA says that it will investigate whether fans were given “clear and timely information”.

Any free market economist would call this a classic case of information asymmetry. There was certainly a lack of clarity over how high ticket prices might eventually go, with the additional chaos of a time limit putting pressure on fans to make an imminent decision about whether they were going to buy.

Ticketmaster claims that the dynamic pricing mechanism is the best way to deter ticket touts, the logic being that any tout buying tickets in bulk would increase demand and therefore see his or her prices and margins slashed. The Guardian has already said that secondary ticketing platforms are advertising more than 4,500 tickets for this tour already, including from one tout who claims to have at least 33 tickets for Cardiff, Wembley and Murrayfield listed, for a combined price of over £26,000.

I am glad that this summer the Government announced a consultation on the secondary ticketing market, where tickets are sold in bulk by touts who often use bots to scout for tickets at face value and sell them well beyond the market value, but will the Minister set out the parameters and timescales for the work? When will it happen and what is it likely to include? He has now announced that the investigation will be widened to consider dynamic pricing and what happened in the Oasis situation, so can we have a reassurance that the eye will not be taken off the ball of the original consultation that he announced in the summer?

There are so many aspects at play. This method of resale is also the culprit for a large amount of money lost to fraud, with Lloyd’s estimating that £1 million was lost to scammers during Taylor Swift’s Eras tour alone. Will the Minister tell me whether the secondary market consultation will include conversations with digital search engines that are signposting customers into the hands of touts and not doing enough to get them direct to principal sales sites?

There is scope for an entire primary market review and for ticketing to be reviewed on a much wider scale. The Oasis episode has opened the eyes of fans to potential anti-competitiveness within the industry. As complaints about the ticketing process began to flood in, Oasis said it was their management and promoters who had agreed a dynamic pricing strategy with Ticketmaster. But, of course, their three tour promoters all have links to Live Nation, Ticketmaster’s parent company and, in effect, they are all the same party. So that party is making money hand over fist through the system, which keeps everything under the Live Nation umbrella.

For a typical tour, a Live Nation subsidiary promoter might take 10% of the face value of a ticket. A service charge of perhaps a quarter of that face value will then be applied, and some of that money will be going to Live Nation-owned Ticketmaster. The venue will take a cut at this stage, which, in all likelihood, will be a Live Nation-owned venue, too, as it owns 28 festivals and venues UK-wide. The process is repeated at resale, if people go through Ticketmaster at a higher cost than before, leaving Live Nation with an even greater cut.

The Minister does not need to be a public intellectual to see that there is a real perverse incentive for Ticketmaster to see tickets in the hands of touts. He will know that the US Department of Justice has slapped Live Nation with a lawsuit, citing anti-competitive conduct, while it is now well established that the company has a near monopoly in the UK.

Dynamic pricing is quite an effective way of rewarding a near-monopoly, with no upper limit on ticket prices, meaning a greater cut for the parent company. The great sadness of all this is not only that the system is punishing the fans—in this case, those Oasis fans for whom the music was so totemic, so life changing back in the ‘90s—but that, to add insult to injury, there is no trickle down to the live music ecosystem, like the grassroots music venues that Oasis first played in while honing their skills, the venues that made them, such the Boardwalk in Manchester and King Tut’s in Glasgow.

Although Oasis have since announced further tour dates, tickets to new dates will be sold at face value via invitation-only ballot. I cannot help feeling that the fans who paid through the nose via dynamic pricing are going to feel very hard done by.

I encourage the Minister to look at ways to amplify fans’ voices within the live music ecosystem. He might start by responding to the Culture, Media and Sport Committee’s report into grassroots music, which I have already mentioned. It was published in May. I know that we have had the small matter of a general election since then, but I would like to know when the response is likely to be forthcoming and whether the Government are minded to accept its recommendations. The recommendations include one for a fan-led review of music—something like the fan-led review of football that was led by my still friend, my former hon. Friend, the former Member for Chatham and Aylesford, Tracey Crouch—to look at how the music pyramid functions and how the money trickles down from the big players to those small venues and fledgling songwriters and artists.

The recommendations included a targeted VAT cut, which to grassroots venues would have represented a final hour of salvation in a sector that is widely accepted to be in crisis, and a live music levy, which would take a small proportion of the service fee from the pockets of the big venues and bring them right down to the struggling businesses at the grassroots. What is most pertinent to me about all this is that, while many of the 28 venues and festivals in which Live Nation owns a stake are flourishing, grassroots music venues are closing at a rate of two a week.

I am sure that the Minister is aware that, of the 34 music venues in which Oasis played on their first tour back in 1994, only 11 are still open today. And those venues are so crucial. They are absolutely fundamental to incubate our world-renowned talent. They are the R&D department for the music industry. They are a massive feeder into something that is fundamental to the UK economy and crucial to our soft power around the world. In a ticketing market gone wrong, there might have been a gram of comfort to some of the fans paying through the nose for their ticket if they knew that, in paying it, some of the money was protecting grassroots music venues in their communities and germinating the Oasis of the future.

I know that, like me, the Minister wants nothing more than to see our musical talent continue to thrill fans both at home and around the world, but behind every great act is a chance performance at a low-capacity venue that is struggling to keep the lights on, that is at financial breaking point, and that is a hair’s breadth away from closing its doors.

I call the Minister.

It is a particular delight to see you in the Chair, Madam Deputy Speaker; I have not had an opportunity to congratulate you on your election—hurrah!

It is also a great delight to see the hon. Member for Gosport (Dame Caroline Dinenage) and to congratulate her on her election. Not many Tories have been elected to many things this year, but it is a great delight to see that she is returning as the Chair of the Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport. She knows a lot about this subject and has devoted a lot of her time and energy to it, and I look forward to working with her. I am sure there will be times when she has cross words with me, but sometimes cross words make Governments better. That was certainly my policy when I was sitting on the Opposition side of the House, so I am sure that what is good for the goose is good for the gander.

Live events are really important to the British creative economy, and to the whole economy in the UK. It is the joy that they bring. I am sorry to start with a Kylie reference—well, actually I am not—but I would defy anybody to have gone to the Kylie concert in Hyde Park this summer and not come away bouncing with joy and full of the joys of spring. It was beautiful. It was amazing. It was thousands and thousands of people in a royal park enjoying themselves and celebrating. For others who went the night before, it was Stevie Nicks, in a completely different vein, but none the less providing that same sense of joy. That is an important part of what live events can do—that sense of being part of an enormous crowd of people enjoying either singing along or listening and that special sense of being together.

Live music is really important to our economy. I remember, it must be a year ago now, being in Newcastle: Sam Fender was performing at St James’ Park and we went to see P!nk, who was on at the Stadium of Light. That must have brought millions of pounds into the local economy. It was certainly an awful lot of money for the local hotels. Down in Cardiff we have lots of concerts, which many people from the south Wales valleys go to, and people come from all over the world. When Springsteen was there earlier this year, Cardiff basically had to be closed off, but the knock-on for the hotels, the bars and the hospitality industry was really significant. It was also significant for tourism, for which I am also the Minister.

It was reckoned that 200,000 people in the UK worked in the live events industry last year and it is an important part of what we do. It is part of the reason many people want to come to the UK. If I may gently say so, one of the things we would like to sort out is British acts being able to tour elsewhere in Europe, but it is good that Europeans are able to come here to see some of our acts.

The hon. Lady makes a really important point that this issue is not just about very big venues; it is about small venues as well, and I do have anxiety about the state of play for many of them. Some of those problems are shared with the whole of the hospitality industry, incidentally—skills, staffing, the costs of fuel, security and so on—but it is a simple fact, as she points out and as her Select Committee has pointed out, that there have been far too many closures over recent years. We stand ready to do what we possibly can to try to slow down, if not halt, that process of closure, because she is right: if an act does not have somewhere to start with a capacity of 250 or 300 or 500, how will they ever grow to end up filling Wembley or any of the arenas we have been talking about? The value in live events is created by the artist, the fans and the venue—it is a combination of the three; it is not created by ticket touts—and it is that combination that we really have to work on.

The hon. Lady is absolutely right that ticketing has changed. I remember once when I was in Saint Petersburg, or Leningrad as it was then—that is how old I am—I went to buy tickets for the opera and we bought tickets that were rolled up in a little peg hole. That is what a ticketing system used to be. That is what theatres used to have in the UK. Then we changed over to a system of having a physical ticket that we presented. Many of us have kept all our tickets for all the shows we have ever been to; I know friends who have collections of Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark tickets through the years and so on. Now, of course, we have a completely online, digital system. That is great in many ways. It can be easier and enhance security, but it can also be much more difficult, and has produced a whole set of new challenges for fans, artists and venues to make the market work effectively: barcodes, QR codes and all the rest of it; transferring a ticket from one person to another; different apps developed by different venues, and so on.

There are very new challenges. First, there is security, to which the hon. Lady referred, and someone getting the ticket that they actually paid for, rather than a ticket that did not exist in the first place. We have all heard hideous examples of that, and it is an embarrassment for us all that over recent years we have seen so few prosecutions in that area, despite the fact that nearly all of us can cite instances of constituents falling prey to those who are effectively selling tickets that they thought they might be able to buy online but do not possess. People then turn up to the venue and find that their tickets are not being honoured because they were not tickets in the first place. That is a security issue in the modern market.

There is also a fairness issue. The hon. Lady points out the experience of people logging on at 9 o’clock and sitting there for hours and hours. It is a system in which we have no idea how somebody gets to be number 1,273 rather than 1,884 in the queue. It seems completely and utterly random, but one suspects that there might be clever means by which people who have deep pockets and know how to navigate the system are able to manipulate it. It is clear that there are many instances of bots effectively hoovering up a large number of tickets using lots of different IDs, credit cards and the rest of it. That is an issue of fairness. Is everybody queuing fairly or not?

Then, there is the question of transparency. Online sites are not as open as they might be about the real or original cost—the face-value cost—of the ticket that they then sell for a different price. Some people say to me, “Well, it says ‘FV’, and all you have to do is click on the FV,” but why do sites not make the face value immediately obvious? Let me give the House one instance of inflated pricing, which is much more excessive in the secondary market than the hon. Lady said.

If someone who wants to see Dua Lipa at the Royal Albert Hall on 17 October visits the Viagogo site, they can either buy a ticket with a face value of €63 for £912— I do not know why it is cited in euros—or they can buy a ticket with a face value of £70 for £1,000. Or—and this is my favourite—they can buy for £9,444 a ticket that has a face value of £126.38. As the hon. Lady rightly said, not a single penny of the difference between £126 and £9,444 will go to the artist, the venue, the cleaner or lighting expert in the venue, the person who wrote the songs that Dua Lipa will sing, or the fans. It is simply going to Viagogo, and I think that that is unfair. It is not right; it is inappropriate. I know dozens and dozens of artists who are utterly embarrassed about the situation in which they find themselves, and they want us to act in this sphere.

Of course I give way to one of our leading musicians.

We are delighted that the Minister is on top of this and knows about the issues and difficulties, but we are more interested to hear, in the time that he has left, about what he will do to resolve it. There have been reports from the Competition and Markets Authority and the Select Committee of the hon. Member for Gosport (Dame Caroline Dinenage). Will the Government look at them constructively and bring in legislation so that this is no longer a feature of live ticket sales?

The hon. Gentleman is a terribly impatient man; I am just coming that. [Interruption.] No, we have until 7.30. He is right that we must take action on the secondary ticketing market, and we committed ourselves to doing so during the general election. We believe that those people are denying true fans the opportunity to buy tickets on the primary market and are pocketing any profit for themselves. As I said, very little of the additional revenue actually goes to artists, venues or anyone working in the live venue sector more generally. The Government are committed to putting fans back at the heart of live events, and to clamping down on unfair practices in the secondary ticketing market.

That is why we have committed to introducing new protections for consumers on ticket resales, and we will be launching a consultation in the autumn to find the best ways to address ongoing problems on the resale market. The consultation will consider a range of options, including revisiting recommendations from the Competition and Markets Authority’s 2021 report, such as putting limitations on the price of tickets listed for resale over the face value; limiting the number of tickets that individual resellers can list to the number of tickets that they can legitimately buy via the original platform; making platforms accountable for the accuracy of information about tickets that they list for sale; and ensuring that the CMA has the powers that it needs to take swift, decisive action against platforms and touts to protect consumers.

We want live events ticketing to work for UK fans. I would say that the market was made for humanity, not humanity for the market, and sometimes Government need to intervene to ensure that the market does indeed work for humanity.

Persuade people to do more gigs, I guess. Obviously, there are only so many tickets for certain events, but what people want to have guaranteed is that the market is not excluding them solely on the basis of price. Sometimes there is a ballot for tickets, as there is for Wimbledon, and I gather that Oasis has now introduced a partial ballot for the next round of gigs that are being advertised, but we want to look at all these issues in the round.

I should say something about the CMA announcement. Like many Members across the House, I know lots of people, including my hon. Friend the Member for Rugby (John Slinger) and the Leader of the House, with stories about their process of trying to buy tickets two weekends ago for the Oasis reunion tour—I should point out that Oasis only reunites under a Labour Government. In the light of the concerns expressed by fans about the sales process, we welcome the CMA’s announcement that it has launched a formal investigation into Ticketmaster. The CMA has said that it is

“concerned that fans trying to buy Oasis tickets through Ticketmaster may not have been given clear information about ticket prices”

and has asked fans to share their experiences. Its investigation will look at whether the sale of Oasis tickets by Ticketmaster may have breached consumer protection law.

Others have greater freedom in what they can say than I do as a Minister. This is a live investigation and the CMA is an independent law enforcement body, and it is important to ensure that the independence and integrity of any investigation is protected, so, in order to avoid prejudicing the process, I am not going to comment on that investigation. I look forward to reading the CMA’s findings and I merely note that lots of people have said that they would like their money back. Following recent events, however, the Government will look at issues concerning the transparency and use of dynamic pricing in the live events sector, and we are carefully considering how that is taken forward in the light of the CMA’s announcement.

I want to talk specifically about dynamic pricing for a moment. In general terms, dynamic pricing involves a business adjusting its prices according to changing market conditions such as high and low demand. It is an established pricing strategy and it has been a feature of our live events industry for some time, at least in certain forms. As an example, I am sure that many Members will have managed to snap up cut-price tickets to popular west end shows by purchasing them on the day of the event. We are used to seeing organisers or venues slash their prices in that way in order to fill the few remaining seats.

It is also common to see early-bird tickets released at lower prices—punters essentially receive a discount on full-price tickets for an event by buying their tickets within a certain period after they go on sale or until a limited batch has been sold. Glastonbury does that, Wigmore Hall does that for people who are signed up to its programme, and for that matter, the Rhondda arts festival in Treorchy also does that. I urge people to look online and buy some tickets for next year.

In both of those scenarios, there are fans who benefit from a better deal than they might otherwise have been able to secure had they bought their tickets at another time. Equally, there will be other fans who bought their tickets at another time and had to pay a different, or indeed higher, price. Hon. Members will have their own views on all this, but I suggest it is a trade-off that most people are accustomed to, and one that we can generally accept.

We would not want half-empty venues—despite looking around the Chamber—due to tickets being priced too high, nor venues and festivals that are not economically sustainable. What we should not accept, however—I am very clear about this, as are the Government —are practices that see fans of live events blindsided by price hikes, either because they were not provided with the right information up front or because that information was not provided clearly enough. Doing so might be in breach of existing consumer law, which requires businesses to be fair and transparent in their dealings with consumers. It is the responsibility of the CMA to investigate potential breaches of consumer law arising from or involving the use of dynamic pricing methods, and to take enforcement action where appropriate. I have already referred to its investigation in this case.

It is the responsibility of Government, however, to confront the wider policy questions around the use of dynamic pricing for tickets to live events. We have already said that we will look at this issue further to establish whether consumers are adequately protected under existing law, or whether more needs to be done. The hon. Member for Gosport asked whether this means that we are going to take our eye off the ball on the secondary ticketing market—it does not. We are very clear: we have a set of manifesto commitments, and we will bring out our consultation this autumn. Once we have completed that consultation, we expect to take the necessary action that we committed to in our general election manifesto. Since most of that action is in line with what the Select Committee was advocating before the general election, I hope we might still enjoy the Committee’s support for it.

The hon. Lady is right that we will also be looking at websites: that is part of the whole panoply of action. She also effectively referred to vertical integration within the ticketing system. Of course, that has to be part of our considerations, because it is another part of making sure that the market works for humanity—for fans, artists and the creative industries—rather than all of us having to operate as slaves of the market.

The Prime Minister has said that we are committed to putting fans at the heart of music and ending extortionate resales. As I have said, we will launch a consultation this autumn to work out how best we can do that. That consultation will look at tickets for live events, and a call for evidence on the topic of price transparency, including dynamic pricing, will be sent out. That will help us understand the needs of fans and the live events industry. To be absolutely clear with the House and the hon. Lady, that will be about tickets for live events, not the whole of dynamic pricing across all industries in the UK.

The hon. Lady asked when we will respond to the grassroots venues report from May. We have been getting our feet under the table as fast as we possibly can, and I am very eager to respond to that report in swift order. I take the responsibilities of Select Committees very seriously—I sat on the Culture, Media and Sport Committee from 2001 to 2005; it is one of the most important things I have done as a Member of Parliament—so we will respond as soon as we can. It will certainly be in the autumn, and I would like it to be as soon as possible after the Committee is fully formed.

In conclusion, I would like to thank the hon. Lady for securing this debate. I am not allowed to refer to what she tried to get as urgent questions, but I have now. We have a world-class live events sector in the UK, and I am absolutely determined that fans have every opportunity to experience it at first hand.

There is nothing better than someone standing in an audience—in a crowd, along with hundreds of other people—either experiencing an artist they have never seen before and suddenly realising, “My God, that’s just pierced right through to my heart”, or going to see somebody they have seen 50 times before, having listened to the album 75 times in the past week, and having that joyful moment. They will be different artists for every single one of us, but I want far more people in this country to be able to enjoy that opportunity. I want every child to have a creative education, and I want them to have the opportunities that so many others enjoy in my constituency and every other.

I acknowledge that dynamic pricing can help match supply with demand, resulting in both higher and lower prices, but when it is used as a business model it needs to be transparent and fair, and that is what we want to ensure.

It was wonderful to hear from two musicians, and Sir Chris Bryant has given away his true old age.

Question put and agreed to.