Recent UK headlines paint a picture of chaos in the world of major pop concerts: fans of Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran, the Rolling Stones, Beyoncé and Jay-Z, and Justin Timberlake angered by invalid tickets, last-minute seat swaps leading to impaired views, unexplained show cancellations and paying hefty prices upfront only to see tickets being given away free in the car park. But industry experts say that many of these inconveniences are part of new approaches designed to beat touts and secondary sellers, ultimately improving the consumer experience.

Fans attending the last two shows of Ed Sheeran’s four nights at Cardiff’s Principality stadium this weekend will be greeted by a flashing sign welcoming “Victims of Viagogo”. When Sheeran’s tour went on sale in June 2017, he was clear that tickets bought through secondary ticketing sites would be invalid and asked the four major resellers not to list his performances in order to avoid inconvenience: only Viagogo refused to comply. Any fans holding invalid Viagogo tickets are being offered the opportunity to buy a new face value seat, which has led to widely publicised queues. The Rolling Stones have offered fans holding tickets bought through Viagogo a similar face value exchange.



Stuart Galbraith is the chief executive of Sheeran’s tour promoter, Kilimanjaro Live. “They’re still quoting that they have the cheapest tickets in town for the Cardiff gigs,” he says of Viagogo. “And we know they don’t have the tickets they say they’ve got.” Before Sheeran’s Wembley show on 14 June, his management witnessed Viagogo operatives buying tickets from touts in order to fulfil fraudulently sold orders, says Galbraith. A police search recovered 20 empty envelopes for Viagogo orders printed with an order number and the number of tickets that they were supposed to contain. “We hope that it’ll lead to them being investigated,” says Galbraith.

In keeping with a wider backlash against Taylor Swift, there has been some schadenfreude over reports that the UK leg of her Reputation tour, concluding tonight in London, hasn’t sold out. The tour has had its own ticketing inconsistencies: some fans in Manchester had their front row spots swapped for seats towards the back of the Etihad stadium owing to a production issue, while others were given unexplained upgrades. Thomas Kent from Wakefield received a text message three days before the concert telling him to check online to find out the location of his new seats, moving him from 10 rows back in a side block to a central position four rows from the front.



Swift’s tour wasn’t designed to sell out immediately, promoter Ticketmaster explained to the Wall Street Journal. Instead “aggressive pricing” and a fan-oriented purchasing system were intended to prevent the resale of tickets at higher prices. In the US only, half the tickets for Swift’s tour were allocated to Ticketmaster’s Verified Fan presale, in which fans could register for the opportunity to buy tickets early and participate in a controversial scheme to improve their queue position by streaming Swift’s videos and buying her merchandise. However, the Wall Street Journal questioned whether the term “slow ticketing” was a way of rebranding ticket sales that were slower than expected owing to their cost.

It points to the key difference between Sheeran and other artists. Standard tickets for Swift’s tour cost between £83.70 and £340, with hospitality and VIP packages running to £735. Tickets to Sheeran’s tour cost between £49 and £88. He does not offer VIP experiences. “He feels his customers should have equal access at sensible ticket prices,” says Galbraith. Many assume that Sheeran’s one-man show means less glitz thus lower overheads, but this isn’t the case, says Galbraith: “The production is just as big as any other tour.” He speculates that Sheeran’s tour runs on a different model from other musicians: “The calculation is, what do we need to charge to make this work? It should be the reverse: what should the customer be paying and what should we do to make that work?”

The high cost of stadium concert tours is deterring some fans from buying tickets, along with the fact that restrictive British weather and the dates of major sports fixtures mean that these large shows take place in a relatively concentrated summer period. The effects are visible: in Glasgow, tickets for Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s On the Run II tour (£51 to £475) were given away in the car park before the show. Justin Timberlake recently cancelled three of his upcoming UK tour dates without explanation, leading fans to assume that the shows were undersold owing to the poor commercial performance of his latest album, Man of the Woods.

Thomas Kent paid £267 for his two original tickets to see Swift, reasoning that “when you’re paying £80 and you can’t even see Taylor, you might as well spend more for a better experience”. He also had full-price tickets to see Shakira this month but resisted paying upfront to see Katy Perry because he couldn’t justify all three. Ultimately he found £29 tickets for Perry’s Sheffield show on Groupon, having heard about similar offers in the US. “They charge too much money for the everyday person, especially when lots of people tour at the same time,” Kent says of major pop tours. “A few years ago, £50-ish was what you would pay for standing at an arena show and it just keeps going up.”