The Actual Cost of a Loyal Fan: What Ticket Pricing Gets Wrong

Devorshi Das – John Hampden Grammar School

In August 2024, Oasis fans queued for hours only to watch ticket prices climb before their eyes. Economic theory frames this as allocatively efficient, yet it outraged buyers. Roth (2007, p. 38) called such exchanges “repugnant transactions”: efficient, but met with moral backlash.

An artist’s promoters belong in this conversation, not because the theory is wrong, but because a concert ticket is not a one-off transaction, and Oasis’s reunion tour staked everything on fans returning. It’s a fan’s entry into a relationship that can generate future ticket, merchandise and streaming revenue. Squeezing every pound today can decay that relationship’s value.

Economic theories favour dynamic pricing: letting prices rise and fall with demand can match supply and demand more efficiently than a single fixed price. Williams (2021) validates this, revealing that dynamic pricing in the airline sector expanded output by 2.7% and improved total welfare by approximately 1%. However, an airline passenger won’t have an ongoing relationship with the airline; an Oasis fan does. Applying the same logic to concert tickets misses something: a fan priced out by an unpredictable algorithm loses more than a passenger does; a fixed price that sells out in minutes hands that loss to resellers instead.

The investigation concluded a year later that the cause was less dramatic than the algorithm everyone blamed. Ticketmaster had stealthily sold standing tickets at two separate prices and charged 2.5 times the standard rate for ‘Platinum’ tickets that were identical. This wasn’t disclosed to fans when waiting (Competition and Markets Authority, 2025; hereafter CMA). Though no dynamic pricing occurred, fans reacted as if it had been. Leslie and Sorensen (2009) showed secondary-market prices across 56 concerts averaging 41% above face value, going to resellers, not the artist.

The psychology behind Oasis fans’ backlash has been well documented. Kahneman, Knetsch and Thaler (1986) observed that 82% of people call it unfair when a hardware store raises snow shovel prices after a blizzard, a ‘reference-transaction’ effect: judging the price against what they paid before makes any hike feel exploitive. Fans who feel cheated may buy less merchandise, stream less and skip the next tour. The cost of “efficient” pricing falls significantly on fans who queued first.

The known counterargument is that underpriced tickets leave “money on the table”. Courty  (2003) shows the opposite can be true: for a high-demand event with fixed capacity, selling every ticket early at one price can earn an artist more than charging latecomers whatever they want to pay, since losing early buyers will cost more than late buyers add. Connolly and Krueger (2005) call this the ‘Bowie theory’ where recorded revenue collapsed, touring became artists’ main income and the incentive to underprice disappeared. Cheap tickets, I’d argue, still work as an investment in loyal fans who’d return to sustain demand. Radoias (2019) supports this, showing resale overcharge is driven by artist’s popularity, not failed pricing indicating it’s a choice, not a mistake. Each finding shows the ticket is not just the product being sold. The relationship is.

Loyalty requires something pricing models will overlook: trust, the thing Oasis fans felt Ticketmaster broke. The CMA (2021) has warned that pricing algorithms are impossible to explain, even for the individuals who built them. Its like a black box, separating a price hike from anyone accountable for it.

Oasis fans blamed the artist’s team, not Ticketmaster’s system. This misplaced blame is evidence of the problem: audiences can’t hold a system responsible for something they don’t understand. The CMA additionally found algorithmic systems can learn to coordinate prices without human agreement, nudging prices higher without collusion.

A concert ticket, unlike a plane seat, carries the promise of coming back; pricing it effectively today harms an asset which could pay out for years.

Dynamic pricing should not be banned outright for mega-events; the mechanism is economically rational, but disclosure is what must change. Courty’s early-pricing approach outperforms letting prices float freely, even though it can raise total welfare while cutting consumer surplus, and the underpricing itself is a deliberate choice, not a mistake.

Regulators should mandate upfront disclosure of all pricing tiers before the customer joins the queue, using the CMA’s power under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, including two years of compliance reporting. Disclosure allows fans to decide with open eyes whether the ticket is worth the relationship, rather than feeling misled afterwards. This preserved trust is what keeps them buying merchandise, streaming and returning for new tours, the revenue the pricing was trying to protect. I’d argue disclosure, not prohibit, is the right solution. A ban trades away efficiency; the silence Oasis exposed costs trust.

The real cost of a loyal fan was never really the ticket. It's what got priced out.

Bibliography

Competition and Markets Authority (2021) Algorithms: How they can reduce competition and harm consumers. London: CMA. Available at: gov.uk/government/publications/algorithms-how-they-can-reduce-competition-and-harm-consumers.

Competition and Markets Authority (2025) CMA secures changes from Ticketmaster following Oasis tickets investigation. London: CMA. Available at: gov.uk/government/news/cma-secures-changes-from-ticketmaster-following-oasis-tickets-investigation

Connolly, M. and Krueger, A.B. (2005) Rockonomics: The Economics of Popular Music. NBER Working Paper No. 11282. Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research.

Courty, P. (2003) 'Ticket Pricing under Demand Uncertainty', Journal of Law & Economics, 46(2), pp. 627–652.

Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 (c. 13). London: The Stationery Office.

Kahneman, D., Knetsch, J.L. and Thaler, R.H. (1986) 'Fairness as a Constraint on Profit Seeking: Entitlements in the Market', American Economic Review, 76(4), pp. 728–741.

Leslie, P. and Sorensen, A.T. (2009) The Welfare Effects of Ticket Resale. NBER Working Paper No. 15476. Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research.

Radoias, V. (2019) 'Price discrimination and the emergence of secondary markets', Managerial and Decision Economics, 40(4), pp. 439–445.

Roth, A.E. (2007) 'Repugnance as a Constraint on Markets', Journal of Economic Perspectives, 21(3), pp. 37–58.

Williams, K.R. (2021) The Welfare Effects of Dynamic Pricing: Evidence from Airline Markets. Cowles Foundation Discussion Paper No. 2103. New Haven, CT: Yale University.