Christopher BarrettLive Nation Entertainment (LNE) CEO Michael Rapino has called for the US Congress to step in and regulate the secondary ticketing industry, and cap re-sale prices at 20%.
“We would love for resale to be regulated in some sense, cap it at 20%,” said Rapino while addressing the Bloomberg Screentime conference in LA. “You shouldn’t have a middleman that has nothing invested in the business make any money from it,” he said.
The LNE boss revealed that the company, which owns Ticketmaster, “got hit by multi-billions of bots on the Oasis on-sale”. He predicted the Oasis Live ’25 stadium tour will be the biggest concert tour of the year in 2025.
The UK government and the Competition and Markets Authority are investigating Ticketmaster’s use of dynamic pricing for the initial dates of the Oasis UK tour, after it sparked widespread complaints from consumers. The Oasis onsale saw fans left waiting for hours in an online queue before unexpectedly facing the prospect of inflated prices of £355 for standing tickets that were shown as being £135 at the outset.
Earlier this month, Oasis declared that secondary ticketing would not be used for the band’s North American leg of the tour. Oasis’ management said, “Ticketmaster’s dynamic pricing model will not be applied to the forthcoming sale of tickets to Oasis concerts in North America. It is widely accepted that dynamic pricing remains a useful tool to combat ticket touting and keep prices for a significant proportion of fans lower than the market rate and thus more affordable.”