An open letter from 130 European artists and industry figures lands weeks after Britain banned for-profit resale. Meanwhile, America doubles down on transparency over price controls. We examine the claims, the data, and the emerging fault lines in a global regulatory battle.
On 12 January 2026, over 130 representatives of Europe’s live events industry signed an open letter to EU Justice Commissioner Michael McGrath. The signatories – including Rammstein, the management companies of Ed Sheeran and Radiohead, FC Barcelona, and festivals from Montreux Jazz to Sziget – had a simple message: help us end unauthorised ticket resale in Europe.
The timing was no accident. Just eight weeks earlier, the UK government had announced plans to make it illegal to resell tickets above face value — one of the most aggressive interventions in secondary ticketing anywhere in the world. The European coalition, organised under the banner of FEAT (Face-value European Alliance for Ticketing), wants Brussels to follow suit through the forthcoming Digital Fairness Act.
But as Europe and Britain converge on price controls, the United States is heading in a different direction entirely. The FTC’s approach focuses on transparency — requiring all-in pricing and cracking down on deceptive practices — while leaving market pricing largely untouched. Forty-eight states permit resale at any price the market will bear.
The result is a global experiment in consumer protection, with three major markets testing fundamentally different theories about how to protect fans from exploitation. The stakes are significant: depending on which estimate you believe, the secondary ticket market is worth somewhere between $3 billion and $30 billion globally, with fraud losses running into hundreds of millions.
The question is whether price caps will solve the problem — or make it worse.
The European Push: Enforcement Failures and Fresh Demands
FEAT’s letter makes specific claims that warrant scrutiny. The coalition asserts that the European secondary ticket market is worth approximately €2.5 billion annually, that ‘tens of thousands’ of consumers are defrauded each year, and that existing enforcement mechanisms under the Digital Services Act have failed.
The market size figure is difficult to verify. FEAT’s own earlier publications cited research from Intellectual Research Partners showing a European market valued at €1.83 billion in 2021, projected to reach €2.29 billion by 2023. Independent analysts paint a more fragmented picture: Business Research Insights estimates Europe’s share at approximately $520 million (around €480 million) in 2024, while global estimates range from $3.14 billion (Mordor Intelligence) to as high as $31 billion (Industry Research). The variance reflects different methodologies and definitions of what constitutes the ‘secondary’ market.
The fraud claims are more verifiable, at least in the UK. Action Fraud data for 2024 recorded 9,826 ticket fraud reports with £9.7 million in losses — a 47% increase on 2023. Concert tickets specifically accounted for 3,700 reports and £1.6 million lost, with half of those scams originating on social media. These are reported figures; actual losses are almost certainly higher.
Where FEAT’s evidence is most compelling is on enforcement. The coalition reports that its members flagged 275 illegal resale listings covering nearly 1,000 tickets throughout 2025 under the DSA’s notice-and-action mechanisms. The response rate from unauthorised platforms? Zero. Not a single takedown, despite the DSA requiring platforms to act expeditiously on illegal content.
‘Unauthorised websites continue to list hundreds of tickets for resale every day, ripping off tens of thousands of consumers each year across Europe,’ FEAT’s founding directors Neo Sala and Scumeck Sabottka stated at their October AGM. ‘We have our eye on you.’
The DSA only came into full force in February 2024, which may partly explain the enforcement gap. But FEAT’s frustration reflects a broader pattern: platforms like Viagogo continue operating across the EU despite potentially breaching national laws in multiple member states. The coalition wants the forthcoming Digital Fairness Act — currently in consultation with a legislative proposal expected in Q4 2026 — to specifically address ticket resale abuse.
Britain Goes All In: The Face-Value Ban
The UK’s November 2025 announcement represented the most aggressive regulatory intervention in secondary ticketing in any major Western market. Under the new rules, it will be illegal to resell tickets for live events above their original cost — defined as the face value plus unavoidable fees, including service charges.
The measures go further than a simple price cap. Service fees charged by resale platforms will themselves be capped at a level yet to be determined. Platforms will have a legal duty to monitor and enforce compliance. And individuals will be banned from reselling more tickets than they were entitled to buy in the original sale — a direct strike at industrial-scale touting.
The government’s estimates are optimistic: £112 million in annual consumer savings, with 900,000 more tickets purchased directly from primary sellers. The average resale price, officials claim, could fall by £37.
Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy framed the move as destroying the ‘operating model of ticket touts’: ‘For too long, ticket touts have ripped off fans, using bots to snap up batches of tickets and resell them at sky-high prices.’
Enforcement will fall to the Competition and Markets Authority under powers granted by the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024. The CMA can now impose fines of up to 10% of global turnover for consumer law breaches — a significant escalation from previous court-based enforcement.
The CMA wasted no time. On 18 November 2025 — the day before the government’s announcement — it opened investigations into both Viagogo and StubHub over their presentation of mandatory fees. The probes focus on whether the platforms engage in ‘drip pricing’: advertising low headline prices, then adding mandatory charges during checkout.
CMA chief executive Sarah Cardell was blunt: ‘At a time when household budgets are under constant pressure, fans spending hard-earned cash on concert tickets deserve a fair deal… Any businesses that break consumer law should have no doubt that we will stamp out illegal conduct.’
The ticketing investigations were part of a broader crackdown. The CMA opened eight enforcement cases on a single day and sent advisory letters to 100 businesses across 14 sectors. A report by the Department for Business and Trade found that drip pricing was present in 93% of event ticket businesses reviewed — higher than any other sector.
Industry reaction split predictably. Live Nation, which owns Ticketmaster, expressed ‘full support’ for the ban, noting it already limits UK resale to face value. Artists who had campaigned for the measure — including Dua Lipa, Coldplay, Ed Sheeran and Sam Fender — welcomed the news.
StubHub and Viagogo were less enthusiastic. A StubHub spokesperson warned that the price cap ‘will condemn fans to take risks to see their favourite live events’, predicting that transactions would migrate to unregulated black markets.
America’s Different Path: Transparency Over Price Controls
Across the Atlantic, regulators have taken a fundamentally different approach. The US has no federal prohibition on reselling tickets above face value, and 48 states permit market-rate resale. Several states that once had price caps — including Florida, Minnesota, Arkansas and Massachusetts — have actively repealed them.
Instead, American enforcement focuses on transparency and anti-fraud measures. The FTC’s ‘Junk Fees Rule’, finalised in December 2024 and effective from May 2025, requires ticket sellers to display all-in pricing upfront. No more drip-feeding service charges, fulfilment fees or ‘facility fees’ at checkout. The total price must be visible from the start.
The FTC has shown teeth. In May 2025, ahead of the NFL schedule release — a moment of peak traffic on ticket platforms — the agency issued a warning letter to StubHub for allegedly failing to include mandatory fees in displayed prices. Each violation carries potential penalties of up to $53,088. The FTC pointedly reminded StubHub that ‘each failure to comply… is a separate violation.’
The Trump administration has taken an interest, too. An executive order in March 2025 directed the FTC to ‘rigorously enforce’ the Better Online Ticket Sales (BOTS) Act, which prohibits using automated software to circumvent ticket purchase limits. A joint report from the FTC, Attorney General and Treasury Secretary on ticketing practices was due in September 2025.
The Department of Justice has also entered the arena. In May 2024, the DOJ and attorneys general from 30 states sued Live Nation and Ticketmaster for alleged monopolistic practices. By September 2025, the FTC had joined the action, alleging the companies had colluded with ticket touts — a striking claim that suggests the problem isn’t just secondary platforms but the structure of the primary market itself.
The philosophical difference is significant. American regulators treat ticket resale as a legitimate market that needs transparency and fraud prevention, not price intervention. The assumption is that consumers can make informed choices if they have accurate information — and that secondary markets serve a valuable function in allocating tickets to those who value them most.
Critics of the UK approach cite this as evidence that price caps are unnecessary. Supporters counter that transparency alone doesn’t address the fundamental unfairness of touts hoarding tickets and extracting rents from desperate fans.
The Contested Evidence: Do Price Caps Increase Fraud?
The most heated debate centres on whether price caps actually protect consumers or expose them to greater risk. The secondary ticketing industry has funded research suggesting the latter — and the findings deserve examination, even if their provenance warrants caution.
Bradshaw Advisory, a consultancy that has worked with resale platforms, published research in June 2025 comparing fraud rates across three markets: the UK (no price cap at the time), Ireland (face-value cap since 2021), and Victoria, Australia (10% markup cap since 2009).
The headline findings were striking. In the UK, 3.8% of survey respondents reported experiencing ticket fraud in the previous two years. In Ireland, the figure was 13.6%. In Victoria, 13.7%. If accurate, fraud rates in price-capped markets are nearly four times higher than in the unregulated UK.
The research has been amplified by UK Finance (representing major banks), criminologist Dr Nicola Harding, and campaign group We Fight Fraud. Revolut reported an 80% spike in ticket fraud among its Irish customers after NFL Dublin tickets went on sale. The financial sector’s concern is practical: since October 2024, UK banks must reimburse victims of authorised push payment fraud, which includes most ticket scams. If caps push more transactions onto unregulated channels, banks face mounting losses.
The government’s own analytical note, published alongside its consultation response, acknowledged the fraud risk but declined to model it. The document states that the impact assessment ‘does not attempt to measure fraud, non-delivery, or loss of consumer protections if sales migrate to informal channels.’ Critics argue this is a significant omission.
But correlation is not causation. Ireland and Australia differ from the UK in ways beyond their resale laws: market size, enforcement capacity, cultural attitudes to ticket purchases, and the prevalence of social media scams all vary. Ireland’s 2021 law has yet to result in a single prosecution, which might explain high fraud rates better than the price cap itself.
Supporters of caps argue that the comparison is misleading. Fraud occurs because scammers exploit desperate fans — and desperation is often created by artificial scarcity and inflated prices in the first place. Face-value resale through authorised platforms, they contend, would reduce desperation and make scams less appealing to both perpetrators and victims.
The truth is likely somewhere in between. Price caps may push some transactions onto riskier channels, but the scale of that migration depends on enforcement, platform cooperation, and the availability of legitimate face-value alternatives. The UK’s approach — combining caps with platform liability and CMA enforcement powers — is more comprehensive than Ireland’s, which may produce different outcomes.
What Happens Next
The EU’s Digital Fairness Act consultation closed in October 2025, with a legislative proposal expected in late 2026. The current focus of the DFA is on dark patterns, addictive design, influencer marketing and unfair personalisation — ticket resale is not a primary concern. FEAT’s letter is an attempt to expand the scope.
Whether that succeeds depends on how persuasively the coalition can make its case. Commissioner McGrath has broad consumer protection responsibilities; he may view ticket touting as a symptom of wider platform governance failures rather than a priority for standalone action. The DSA already provides mechanisms for tackling illegal content — the question is whether those mechanisms can be made to work.
In the UK, the legislative timetable remains unclear. Primary legislation will be required to implement the face-value ban, and parliamentary time is limited. The CMA’s investigations into Viagogo and StubHub may produce results before the new rules take effect, potentially forcing the platforms to change their practices under existing law.
In the US, the picture is more fragmented. Federal action focuses on transparency and antitrust; state-level efforts vary widely. Some industry lobbyists, reportedly including StubHub, have pushed for model legislation that would actually pre-empt stricter state regulations — a reminder that the battle over ticket resale is as much about regulatory capture as consumer protection.
For event organisers, the implications are significant. Platforms that facilitate secondary sales — whether authorised or not — face an increasingly complex regulatory patchwork. Operating in the UK will require different compliance than operating in Germany, which differs again from the US. Multi-market events may need separate ticketing strategies for each jurisdiction.
The broader lesson is that ticket resale has become a proxy for deeper questions about platform regulation, consumer protection and market fairness. When fans queue digitally for Taylor Swift tickets and find themselves competing with bots, when Oasis’ ‘dynamic pricing’ pushes standing tickets to £350, when scammers exploit desperation on Instagram — these aren’t just ticketing problems. They’re symptoms of how digital markets allocate scarce goods.
The UK has chosen intervention. The US has chosen transparency. The EU is still deciding. Within the next two years, we’ll know which approach best serves fans — or whether, as often happens, the scammers and touts find ways around them all.
The Numbers at a Glance
UK Ticket Fraud (2024)
Total reports: 9,826
Total losses: £9.7 million (up 47% on 2023)
Concert ticket fraud: £1.6 million from 3,700 reports
Source: Action Fraud
Fraud Rate Comparison (Bradshaw Advisory, 2025)
UK: 3.8% of ticket buyers reported fraud
Ireland (face-value cap): 13.6%
Victoria, Australia (10% cap): 13.7%
Projected UK Impact (Government Estimates)
Annual consumer savings: £112 million
Additional primary market tickets: 900,000
Average resale price reduction: £37
FTC Penalties (US)
Per violation of Junk Fees Rule: up to $53,088
CMA Powers (UK)
Maximum fine for consumer law breaches: 10% of global turnover
—
ETL welcomes comments from FEAT, Viagogo, StubHub, the CMA and other stakeholders. Contact: adam@eventtechlive.com
