Thousands of music fans have secured tickets for some big name gigs including Bad Bunny and Drake, but how many of them have been ripped off by primary ticketing sites pushing up prices through sneaky fees and surge pricing?
Our members have identified a set of sly pricing strategies that push people into paying unfair premiums on top of already expensive tickets to see live music. Here’s a list of issues that Spanish member OCU and Belgian member Testachats/Testaankoop put to their national consumer watchdogs against Ticketmaster’s concert ticket sale tactics:
OCU found three different grounds for adding on fees – donations, management fees and the elusive ‘additional VIP charges’. In one example, these additions brought the original ticket price of €79.50 up to a huge €269.30. This is made up of €3.30 for a donation, €36.50 euros for management fees and a “VIP charge” of €150, almost twice the amount of the original ticket!
OCU has already challenged the prevalence of the endless ticketing add-ons in a 2024 review of ticketing by the Spanish Consumer Affairs directorate. In this case, it’s hard to see exactly what a 45% management fee is paying for when it is consumers who are choosing seats, booking, making payments and even printing out tickets.
The add-ons are usually only revealed in full when the purchaser comes to pay, meaning there is no transparency in pricing which makes comparing prices and making informed decisions on what to buy very difficult.
Ticketmaster has decided that the extra costs, which remember have pushed the price of the original ticket up by over 200%, are not refundable. This means the buyer loses any right to recover their amount in case they are forced to request an exchange or a refund.
OCU also calls out Ticketmaster’s lack of transparency about dynamic pricing where ticket prices fluctuate based on vaguely described “market conditions” with no transparency about why or how.
Euroconsumers’ Belgian organisation, Testachats/Testaankoop agrees and has taken issue with what they see as Ticketmaster’s misleading communication around how some tickets are priced.
Ticketmaster offered seven different categories of tickets at a range of price levels, with for example, tickets closer to the stage costing more. But for in-demand events, a further, high-cost category called ‘platinum’ tickets was also added.
The problem was that the label ‘platinum’ is stuck onto a standard ticket whose price has been adjusted according to demand, without any additional perks to justify the increase in price or the enticing description.
The analysis carried out by Testachats/Testaankoop and Euroconsumers found no proof that Platinum tickets really give access to the best available seats. Just compare the price of Category 1 tickets or the Golden Circle just in front of the podium, which during sales in June 2025 were priced at €143.58, with that of some Platinum Tickets sold today at more than €469.
Testachats/Testaankoop view the platinum ticket strategy as a kind of dynamic pricing by stealth which is not transparent and undermines consumer choice.
They found mixed messages from the publicly available information on Ticketmaster’s website, with terms and conditions saying “the prices are dynamic and are set in real-time based on variables of supply and demand” but also a Help Centre admission that “Ticketmaster does not use any algorithmic surge pricing technology”.
Testachats/Testaankoop considers this to be a misleading commercial practice under Belgian and European consumer law as it is clearly a misleading omission regarding the way in which the price of the platinum tickets are determined or calculated.
The same tactic was used by Ticketmaster for the controversial Oasis ticket sale in 2024 where the more expensive ‘platinum’ tickets were released once the first batch of lower-priced standing tickets had sold out. This meant that fans queuing to purchase standing tickets were faced with a much higher price when they came to pay, and they had to decide very quickly, after queuing for hours, whether to pay significantly more than they had planned.
The UK competition watchdog the CMA has now reported back on its investigation and found that this practice didn’t meet their definition of dynamic pricing as the prices were not adjusted in real time by an algorithm.
They did however raise concerns that fans lacked clear, timely information about the ticket pricing, and waited in long queues with no idea of what would be available. The CMA are now consulting with Ticketmaster on necessary changes to the way ticket sales are communicated to buyers.
In the Oasis case, some fans paid around 2.5 times the price first advertised, but Testachats/Testaankoop report that prices for these ‘platinum’ tickets can reach up to 7 times the basic rate charged.
In July 2025, Testachats/Testaankoop and Euroconsumers wrote directly to Ticketmaster Belgium asking them to make their pricing policy more transparent, to rename platinum tickets in a clearer way, and finally way, and to put a cap on dynamic pricing results. Ticketmaster has not yet responded.
They also flagged the issue with the national Belgian consumer authority, and with the EU Consumer Protection Co-operation Network which deals with breaches of consumer law across the single market as Ticketmaster’s practices also occur in other EU states.
Euroconsumers have looked at Dynamic Pricing in depth in our recent paper Dynamic Pricing: Definitely, Maybe? and know that when used properly in a competitive market, it can have benefits for consumers.
Major problems with dynamic pricing come when the big, sole provider ticketing agencies in sports or music use their market power to artificially pump up prices and leave consumers with no choice but to pay the inflated price.
OCU is following up its campaign against unfair add-on fees with a fresh drive to make dynamic pricing work for consumers. They want regulators to take a 360 degree look at the practice from the way it uses personal data to set prices, how competition impacts pricing and where a complete ban could be justified. Here’s a summary of their ideas for what regulators could require companies to do:
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