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The U.K.’s Competition and Market Authority (CMA) launched an investigation into Ticketmaster on Thursday over the ticketing giant’s handling of the sales of Oasis tickets. The band hasn’t toured in more than a decade and eager fans logged in over the weekend to wait in virtual lines for a chance to purchase tickets.
If you’ve tried to buy tickets to any kind of live show in the past decade, you probably know how it went. Ticketmaster’s process is a nightmare and it’s hard to tell what a ticket will cost by the time you’ve cleared the line and are ready to make a purchase. Many fans thought they’d be paying around $200 only to have the price balloon to almost $500.
The reason issue is Ticketmaster’s “dynamic pricing,” a process by which the price of tickets changes depending on an algorithm’s perception of the demand for them. If there are more people in line and willing to pay, the price goes up. According to CMA, dynamic pricing will be the specific target of its investigation.
“It’s important that fans are treated fairly when they buy tickets, which is why we’ve launched this investigation. It’s clear that many people felt they had a bad experience and were surprised by the price of their tickets at check-out,” CMA chief executive Sarah Cardell said in a statement on CMA’s website.
CMA noted that dynamic pricing is a part of lots of different storefronts these days. “This is not the first time it has raised concerns among fans of live sporting and music events,” CMA said. “While the practice is not automatically unlawful, it may breach consumer protection or competition law in certain circumstances.”
As part of the investigation, CMA wants fans to reach out and tell them about their experience of trying to buy Oasis tickets. There’s a form people can fill out to tell the CMA about what happened, but it closes on September 19.
Ticketmaster has been in and out of trouble with governments and musicians for years now. Everyone hates using them. Ticket prices constantly change and scalpers easily scoop up hundreds of tickets for popular shows and then sell them off in the gray market at inflated prices.
Oasis said it didn’t know that Ticketmaster would use dynamic pricing during the sale. “It needs to be made clear that Oasis leave decisions on ticketing and pricing entirely to their promoters and management, and at no time had any awareness that dynamic pricing was going to be used,” Oasis told reporters.
In the U.S., the Justice Department sued Ticketmaster earlier this year in an effort to break the company off from Live Nation. The feds said the company had an unfair monopoly on ticket sales and that was at the heart of high prices and poor user experience. In August, the lawsuit was amended to add ten states to the list of plaintiffs.
