By William James
LONDON (Reuters) -Ticketmaster may have misled music fans into paying more for tickets than they had planned last year to see British band Oasis, the UK’s competition watchdog said on Tuesday, urging the company to change how it labels tickets and informs customers.
Thousands of fans waited for hours online to get their hands on highly coveted tickets for the band’s 2025 reunion shows, only to find prices had jumped by the time they got to the front of the queue.
“We’re concerned that Oasis fans didn’t get the information they needed or may have been misled into buying tickets they thought were better than they were,” said Hayley Fletcher, interim senior director of consumer protection at the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA).
The watchdog said it was concerned that Ticketmaster may have breached consumer law. CMA does not currently have power to levy fines for breaching consumer laws, which are enforced through the court system.
A Ticketmaster statement said that it aimed to provide a “simple, transparent and consumer-friendly experience” and welcomed the CMA’s input.
The CMA launched an investigation into Ticketmaster in September to examine if it had engaged in “unfair commercial practices,” and if they were pressured to buy tickets within a short period of time.
The CMA originally said it was also looking at how dynamic pricing models – a form of surge pricing – may have been used, but Ticketmaster has said it did not use dynamic pricing models.
The outcry over the way the ticket sale process was managed became a hot political topic, spurring Prime Minister Keir Starmer to promise to get a grip on the wider issue of event tickets being sold at inflated prices.
The government has since announced proposals to cap resale prices and hold reselling websites more accountable.
The CMA issued an update on its findings on Tuesday outlining two main concerns.
One was that seats labelled as ‘platinum’ were sold at a premium without consumers being made fully aware that they didn’t come with any extra benefits.
Another was insufficient information provided to buyers at the start of the queue on different ticket categories and their prices if cheaper tickets were sold out before their turn to buy.
The CMA said Ticketmaster had made some changes since the investigation began, but that more work was still needed.
“We now expect Ticketmaster to work with us to address these concerns so, in future, fans can make well-informed decisions when buying tickets,” the CMA’s Fletcher said.
(Reporting by Pushkala Aripaka in Bengaluru and William James in London; Editing by Sarah Young and Bernadette Baum)
