Myth-Busting

What does the final ticket price for your favourite live music event actually include? And what does that money do?

Ticket prices, and the practices that go with them, are obviously a hot topic right now following the release of the Oasis Live 2025 tickets. Some of the practices around the sale of these tickets raised more than just eyebrows, with the Competition and Marketing Authority announcing an investigation, members of parliament raising questions in the house, and members of the public shouting their outrage at various parties involved.

First, for regular readers, a notice: Unusually, I’m not here to discuss the missed opportunity for Oasis, their management, agent, promoter, venue or ticket company, to think about the need to reinvest in the future of music via the much talked about grassroots contribution and to have acted to include it in these tickets. An opportunity to raise £1.5 million for the grassroots sector has been missed and that’s a terrible shame. For everyone involved. I’m sure the government and the Culture Media and Sport Select Committee already have enough of an opinion on the lack of a grassroots contribution on the tickets for these shows for me not to need to write another article about it. Get up, move on, remind ourselves that other events are adopting this approach and hope that eventually this message will get through. Preferably before all the venues are closed and there are no future stadium headliners being produced for anyone to make any money out of. Meanwhile, what’s happened on these specific tickets in terms of charges, fees, who benefits and why?

The music industry is not hugely keen on transparency. There’s quite a lot going on when a show is arranged and put on sale, and the ticket price finally paid by the customer is doing a lot to assist the inherent opaqueness which is an historical feature of the deals that are done between artist and manager and agent and promoter and venue and ticketing company. That lack of clarity causes people to make assumptions and direct their anger at the wrong people for the wrong reasons. And that’s important, especially when statutory bodies and government start to become involved, so let’s unravel it a bit and shine some light into some of the dark recesses of what’s actually going on here.

My main preoccupation is grassroots music venues and what happens within them. When it comes to ticketing and pricing, the general music industry rule of keeping things a little bit on the down-low need not apply for a very simple reason: No one is making any money at all out of live music at the grassroots level so we don’t need to dream up incredibly complex ways of masking what it is we are doing. In 2023, grassroots music venues raised £134 million selling tickets and spent £248 million putting on live music. Understandably, there’s hardly anyone in the grassroots sector, from venues to artists and promoters, who is not incredibly comfortable being open about how much money it is costing and how much money they are losing. It’s worth describing the arrangements that are in place to limit those losses via service charges and fees, and I’m going to do that at length in a few minutes, but first let’s look at where the exciting bit is happening in this debate, let’s take out our big magnifying glass and take a hard look at those Oasis tickets.

At this stage of my ‘career’ it seems unlikely that I’m suddenly going to swap a lifetime promoting gigs at 250 capacity and suddenly need to adopt the veil of secrecy that surrounds a Wembley Stadium ticket, so I’m not bound by the gentlemen’s agreement to keep all the following private and hidden. Much of what you are about to read is my best guess at what’s happening based on forty years of experience of live shows, promoting, ticketing and venue costs. Let’s start where the focus of public attention has been and that is with the ticketing company. In the case of Oasis, that means starting with the general public’s favourite punching bag for live music, Ticketmaster.

Firstly, and this only needs reiterating because a few people refuse to accept it; Ticketmaster received nothing at all from the face value of the ticket itself. Regardless of whether you paid face value or an increased value because of dynamic or surge pricing, none of that money will end up in an account labelled Ticketmaster. Didn’t happen this time, has never happened, won’t ever happen. Ticketmaster’s money is entirely located in the Service Charge, set at 10% across these shows. Next question: Did they get all of that?

My best estimate is that the ‘Service Charge’ on Oasis tickets, all 19 shows, raised £23 million. That’s a slightly conservative estimate, and there is the potential within the model that was used for it to be significantly more. It almost certainly isn’t significantly less, although the rule of thumb for this article is that I would be incredibly happy if anyone directly involved wants to correct me. Unlike the grassroots sector, where we can offer a good stab at complete transparency on what that service charge means (what is it for and who gets it), at arena and stadium level it is not at all clear who got that ticket service charge fee. Nor what it was for. What we can say with complete certainty is that Ticketmaster did not get a minimum £23 million pay day for 12 hours work.

Let’s start with the basic assumption that the absolute maximum they could possibly have received, and that’s just using a well-known and established industry standard model as our starting point, would have been 50%, or £11.5 million. If you don’t know the industry, that might come as a shock, but the reality is that on tickets of this size and scale the ‘service charge’ most people assume to be a ticketing company charge is, in reality, split between the ticketing company and other parties, which might include the promoter, agent, manager, artist and venue. On these shows, if I am the agent, the manager or the promoter, there is no way I am letting even that scale of money, 50% of the service charge equating to approximately 4.5% of the total basic gross, go to the ticketing company to deliver their work. I would be calculating how much human endeavour they have to put behind managing the tickets versus how much can be automated, thinking about their costs, considering their need to make a profit, then offering them a percentage rate, or even a flat service fee, to do their work. How much was that in this case? If I was being super generous, I’d agree they can earn £5million, which is about 2% of the gross take. I don’t have inside information that enables me to tell you that was the amount, I’m giving you my best guess based on having done thousands of events and having to think about who gets what from the money raised. Again, if anyone from Ticketmaster wants to break cover and reveal the actual amount, the comments on this post are open, and you can even post anonymously. If you think that guess is wildly out, keep in mind that 1-3% is the ballpark of what Live Nation themselves have publicly declared is being received from service charges by their ticketing arm Ticketmaster from these type of shows.   

£5 million would be a good pay day for Ticketmaster from these shows but would not, as some people have assumed, be the profit they make. They are undoubtedly going to have to put staff on the ground, they have the liability of managing 1.4 million customers for fulfillment of the tickets, and they have the public facing reputation at stake of the 10 million or so disappointed customers who want to know why they didn’t get tickets. If you asked me to do that for £2.5 million I’d probably say no, £5 million however would make sense. However, the ‘Service Charge’ raised £23 million, so that immediately opens up the question of what happened to the (likely minimum) remaining £18 million? Importantly, who got it and what was it used for?

A conservative estimate on the value of the primary ticket sale, the face value of the tickets, would pitch it at £229 million. Again, the method used to sell these tickets may have significantly bypassed that estimate, but if the tickets were sold at their face value, and they were all sold, that’s a good solid place to start. Within that £229 million, the promoters will need to cover venue hire, staffing, production, everything they need to deliver to make the shows happen. A good rule of thumb here would be to start from the basic estimate that all of that probably takes up 60% of the income, £137 million. That 60% is based on historical amounts, the variables around it would include the scale and size of the production (Taylor Swift, for example, would likely have much higher production costs than we are going to see at these shows - well, unless they are intending to hire a dancing troupe and triple the size of the band) and the need to deliver an event with a suitable staffing and security level appropriate to the artist. You have heavier security financial demands from hosting a rave than you do from an appearance by Steps. Again, anyone at Live Nation, SJM, MCD or DF is more than welcome to correct me, but my guess would be 60% for these shows.

This leaves us with £92 million from the primary box office. If you want my guess, and hold on to your seats here, it would be that Oasis, however they are dividing it up between the two of them or anyone else they choose to add to the band, will be taking 100% of this. Actually, modern practice is they are probably taking more than that. Again, anyone involved is welcome to post below the actual amount, but unless someone is willing to do that you’re stuck with me and my best guess so here it is: I think there was an original offer to entice them back that put their fee in the nice round ballpark of £100 million. This fee plus venue hire, production, staffing and artist fees creates a grand total of 103% of the door receipts directly from tickets.

What this means is that we have exhausted all £229 million of the primary ticketing receipts, and the promoters are, so far, losing money. To be exact, they are likely to be £8 million in the hole. Skip back a couple of paragraphs to where we discussed the ‘Service Charge’ and the missing £18 million. It’s not missing. It’s required to make the whole thing make financial sense for the promoters.

Some of these numbers will be bang on, some of them will be miles out. Again, there are people in our industry that could write all this with the exact knowledge of how it was done but they are reluctant to do that. I don’t have any skin in this game so I am happy to try and lift up the curtain and give you a glimpse of what is likely happening backstage.

Whatever the exact numbers in play for these events, however, the basic concept of who is being paid, what they are being paid, and, most importantly of all, how they are being paid won’t change. Maybe the production fees came in more expensive, and the band are only getting £80 million. Maybe the venue hires came in really cheap and there was a little bit of money left for the promoters within the basic primary ticket sale. However it worked out on these specific shows, the ‘Service Charge’ is a principal means by which the promoter can increase their income without acquiring more costs and without the necessity to share it with the artist, agent or manager based on the existing contractual terms. A tour of this scale almost certainly means that the promoter did, in fact, have an agreement with the artist that also got them a share in the £18 million, but that won’t change the basic premise at play here; the service charge, which people think is Ticketmaster profit, is supporting the basic costs of putting the shows on.

At the grassroots end of the musical spectrum, we are a lot keener on transparency. Collectively, as previously mentioned, no one is making any money out of selling tickets alone, so conversations tend to be a lot more open with the public about what we are doing and why we are doing it. If you see a charge on a ticket (most likely £1 or a 10% service charge) then it isn’t much of a concern financially in any case, but if you are wondering, then no grassroots music venue in the country is going to mind me telling you that they often get a small slice of this from their ticket retailer which they use to underwrite the costs of opening the venue. If they are doing that, or there is anything like a maintenance fee or refurbishment fee on top of the ticket, then it will be directly funding their basic costs of opening. You might think that those costs should be covered by the ticket, but the reality is that they aren’t, so venues have got creative to try and get their basic costs like rent, rates, services, energy etc, which frequently aren’t recognised in either venue hire or artist contract, via a service charge or ancillary fee. The difference on the price to the customer is negligible, the impact on the venue of having an extra 50p or £1 which is theirs to keep is really quite substantial. Let’s say you promote 150 shows in a year for a 200-capacity venue, and across all of them you sell 50% of the tickets. The extra 50p that the customer hardly notices just earned you, as the venue operator, an extra £7,500. It’s not exactly £18 million, but it certainly helps.  

These charges at grassroots music venue level emerged because of the nature of the contract with artists and its inability to keep pace with soaring costs. Agents that represent grassroots touring artists are fully aware that the show will be losing money in terms of its ability to raise money from the public, so everyone involved in the event, from the agent to the promoter to the venue, is creating a contract to try and get the artist as much money as possible (good idea), even if that leaves the venue not covering its basic costs to be open (bad idea). Since everyone knows this can’t possibly work, we are all quietly agreeing to ignore additional ‘service’ or ‘facility’ charges which the venue or the promoter has to make in order to make the event make sense financially. Or at least get close to doing that.

Is this the best way to do it? No, obviously not. But to put it simply, a £10 ticket with a £1 charge raises money for the venue and promoter in a way that an £11 ticket, because of the artist contract, cannot. It would be very possible to create a model where the £11 ticket did pay for basic costs, but everyone is reluctant to be the person who makes the first move to rethink the whole question of who gets what from the ticket. The ‘service’ or ‘facility’ charge is a way of doing it without having to resolve that core issue.  If that sounds a bit daft to you as a music consumer, it doesn’t sound any less daft to those of us who are doing it, we just don’t know how to change it.

To summarise; your grassroots music venue ticket with an apparent face value of £10, in almost all cases except where the venue is selling you the ticket direct (probably through a process as seemingly archaic as handing you a physical ticket for cash) will actually cost you something like £11, and the £1 extra is doing two things. Firstly it’s paying the ticketing company for the service of selling it to you, probably about 50% (50p on a £10 ticket), and secondly getting some money (again, most normally 50p on a £10 ticket) into the hands of the venue and/or promoter which is outside of the contract with the agent, manager and artists and can be used to try to underwrite the loss the venue/promoter will be making on the actual show costs. Again, it could be done differently, I’m just being open and honest about how it is currently done.  

Now is a good time to pause and consider the financial benefit to the ticket company, whoever it is, described above. At grassroots level, a 250-capacity show might generate £125 for the ticketing company. There’s been a lot of accusations flying around about what the ticketing company has to do to earn that money. That should be balanced against the reality that at a grassroots level the average capacity on ticketed shows is currently running at 41%, which means that on average the ticketing company is actually making £51.25 per grassroots show. That’s not exactly a fortune already, but there is an additional misconception about what a ticketing company does which we should also clarify. Customers might think that, in the modern digital era, the role of a ticketing company is to set up a show, put the tickets on sale, then watch the £51.25 in riches roll in. In reality, ticketing is a part of the industry that is ripe with human error, complex to manage, and labour intensive. Let’s be generous and assume that the creation of the tools to sell the tickets, the creation of the specific tickets, the registration and distribution of the tickets, and the fulfillment of those tickets (letting the venue know who is coming and providing them with the tools they need to correctly let people in), all of that could be done through automation without human involvement (trust me, it cannot be done that way) and the price therefore came in at something like £20 per show. For the average show under that model there will be 102 people attending. If any single one of these customers has any sort of problem with their ticket, for whatever reason, it will need to be resolved by human intervention by the ticketing company. Generously, they have an average of £31.25 to do that, or about two hours of someone’s time on minimum wage. Whoever anyone might think might be making a killing out of the sale of tickets at grassroots music venue level (Clue: Absolutely no one is), it certainly isn’t the ticketing companies.

The Competition and Marketing Authority (CMA) has announced an inquiry into ticket prices, naming Ticketmaster as the company they want to investigate. That would be like quizzing the corner shop owner on the price of a tin of beans without asking the transport company, the distribution company, the canning company, the processing company or the bean making company what their role was in the price of a tin of beans and what they will permit the corner shop owner to charge. Ticketmaster provided a service to everyone else in this supply chain. There are a lot of reasonable questions about the decisions that were made around that service by everyone involved, not least around dynamic pricing which, cards on the table, I personally hate. But Ticketmaster did not set the price nor are they the principal beneficiaries of the price.

Ticketmaster’s role in deciding the Oasis ticket price point is incredibly minimal. It would be a massive mistake for MPs, the CMA, or the Trading Standards Authority, to waste time investigating one ticket company. What would be much more beneficial for the customer would be if the music industry could be persuaded to open up about how these prices come to be. And the best way to do that is to bring fans into the mix of who is being consulted about these practices and what they think about them.

Which brings me to the point of this article. It’s way past time for a proper, informed, fan-led review. It would provide an opportunity for the live music industry to discuss all these things in public and in an open way that would prevent the CMA or the Trading Standards Authority wasting a lot of time investigating things that, honestly please trust me, just have not happened.

The voice of music fans has been missing for far too long from this conversation.