Nobody Talks About What a Gig Actually Costs. I'm Going To.

You paid £87 for that ticket. A New York jury just decided you were overcharged for most of it. Here’s where the money actually went, and why the industry won’t tell you.

A quick note before we start

What follows is a piece about money. Specifically, about where the money goes when you buy a ticket to a gig. And more specifically, about why almost nobody in my industry wants to talk about it.

Small disclosure: I work in this industry. I run operations at an independent events company in London. That means (a) I know roughly how this works, and (b) a few people I like and respect are going to read this and wince. I’ve done my best to write it in a way that criticises the system without kicking anyone in the shins individually. But the system needs criticising. So here we are.

In a Queue, In August 2024

Roughly ten million people sat in an online queue trying to buy tickets to an Oasis reunion tour.

While they sat there, the price of a standing ticket quietly climbed from £148 to £355.

Nothing had changed about the ticket. Nothing had changed about the venue. Nothing had changed about the band. The people in the queue were the same people who had been in the queue thirty seconds earlier. But the price had more than doubled, and the people at the back had no way of knowing the people at the front were paying less than half as much.

Then, in April 2026, eight days ago as I write this, a federal jury in Manhattan decided that the company selling those tickets had been operating as an illegal monopoly for more than a decade.

The two events are connected.

They are also, I think, the moment the live events industry quietly loses an argument it’s been winning for twenty-five years: the argument that how we price tickets is too complicated to explain.

A Confession

I’m going to tell you something the industry doesn’t say out loud.

Ticket pricing is opaque on purpose.

Not because anyone sat in a room and decided to confuse customers. But because every actor in the chain has a commercial incentive to keep their own margin invisible, and a commercial disincentive to be the first one to explain. The artist’s manager doesn’t want you to know how much of your ticket goes to the artist. The platform doesn’t want you to know how much of your ticket is platform fee. The promoter (that’s me, sort of) doesn’t want you to know how much is us, because the minute you can see our margin, you can compare it to every other place you spend money, and the moment you compare, someone loses an argument.

The result is a pricing model that evolved to be unreadable. Not by design, but by a thousand small decisions, each of which made sense at the time, and the collective effect of which is a £68 face value with a £14.50 booking fee, a £3 service charge, a £2 venue levy, a tiered pricing label you don’t understand, and a pint that costs £8.50.

Nobody poured the water in. It just got slightly warmer, every year, for a generation.

I want to try and do the thing my industry won’t.

The Receipt

Here is a genuinely representative ticket receipt for a mid-sized UK gig in 2026. Not a specific one. A composite. But directionally, this is what you’re paying for.

Item	Cost
Face value	£68.00
Booking fee (platform)	£14.50
Service charge (platform)	£3.00
Venue levy	£1.50
VAT on fees	~a few quid
Total	~£87

Plus, if you actually attend: £3 for the cloakroom, £7 to £8.50 for a pint, £12 for a burger, £11 for the train home. So the ticket is £87 and the night out is £125-ish before anyone’s sung a word. You probably knew that.

What you probably didn’t know is how the £87 breaks down once it leaves your bank.

The Maths

For the sake of the exercise, and because specific numbers from my actual company are confidential, let’s use broad industry-average figures. If anything, the real numbers tend to be less favourable to the promoter than what follows.

Of your £68 face value, roughly:

£34 to the artist. That covers management, crew, production, backline, all the costs of showing up. Half of your ticket. In most cases it is a fixed fee agreed six months in advance that doesn’t flex if the show loses money.
£11 to the venue. Hire, in-house staff, bars, security, insurance, and the cost of keeping the lights on when nobody’s there.
£8 to production. Sound, lights, stage crew, and the riggers who were on site at 6am.
£4 to marketing. The ads you saw on Instagram, and a few you didn’t.
£5 to operations. Tour accounting, licensing, local authority fees, contingency, and the people in my job.
£6 promoter margin. Before tax. Before the twenty to thirty per cent of shows that lose money. Before the fact that contingency gets used more often than it doesn’t.

These are broad strokes. Real shows vary wildly. But the headline is that the promoter margin on a gig — the bit most people assume is where the rip-off lives — is a single-digit percentage. Often less.

Every time a show sells out, the maths works. Every time a show is 60% sold, it starts to hurt. Anything below 50% and you’re writing cheques to cover somebody else’s performance. The business model is closer to a casino than most people realise, except the casino is allowed to keep the losses.

There is, in fact, one part of a British ticket that has started to be transparent about itself, and I want to flag it before we go any further. Since 2025, a voluntary £1 Grassroots Ticket Levy has been added to tickets at a growing number of UK arenas and stadiums, with the money going to the LIVE Trust to support small venues, emerging artists and promoters. The Royal Albert Hall was the first 5,000-capacity venue to sign up. Coldplay, Enter Shikari, Sam Fender, Ed Sheeran, Radiohead, Pulp and a growing list of others have adopted it on UK tours. It is, as far as I know, the only line on a British ticket where you can say with absolute certainty where your money went. Mark Davyd, who runs Music Venue Trust, has been publicly direct that the scheme is working where it has been adopted, and equally direct about who has so far declined to adopt it. SJM, Kilimanjaro and AEG have signed up. Live Nation has not. Make of that what you will.

The £14.50 Problem

The £14.50 is the booking fee. It doesn’t go to the artist. It doesn’t go to the venue. It doesn’t go to the promoter. It goes to the platform.

The platform, in most of the UK and almost all of the US, is Ticketmaster. Which is owned by Live Nation. Which is, as of this month, a company that a federal jury has found to be operating as an illegal monopoly. In Britain, Ticketmaster competes with See Tickets, DICE, AXS and a handful of others, but it still handles most large-venue sales in this country.

Here is what the US government alleged, and what a jury in Manhattan agreed with on April 15th. That Live Nation had leveraged its control of the live music ecosystem — promotion, venue operation, artist management and ticketing — to shut out competitors and overcharge consumers. That the booking fees were not a neutral cost of doing business; they were a monopoly rent. That the competitive alternative to Ticketmaster had been structurally prevented from emerging.

The DOJ settlement, reached in early March, required Live Nation to cap ticketing service fees at 15%, open competition to third-party ticketing platforms like SeatGeek and StubHub, and divest exclusive booking agreements at thirteen US amphitheatres. Thirty-six states rejected the settlement as too lenient and kept the trial running. On the fifteenth of April, the jury sided with the states.

And on this side of the Atlantic, the same company came under investigation by the Competition and Markets Authority in September 2024, after ten million fans watched the price of Oasis tickets more than double while they queued. In September 2025, the CMA secured formal undertakings requiring Ticketmaster to tell fans twenty-four hours in advance when tiered pricing will be used, show the full range of ticket prices when people join a queue, and stop using the “platinum” label that had been used to sell some Oasis tickets at almost two and a half times the price of identical tickets in the same section of the venue.

So. What do we actually have?

We have, as a matter of public record, in two separate jurisdictions, findings that the most dominant ticketing company in live events has been making money in ways its customers didn’t understand, and wouldn’t have agreed to if they did.

That is not a spicy take. That is a jury verdict in New York and a regulator’s undertaking in London.

What the verdict actually means

The verdict doesn’t solve anything immediately. Judge Subramanian still has to decide remedies. The 15% fee cap in the DOJ settlement is a floor, not a ceiling, and the market currently averages well above it. The UK undertakings are specific to what happened with Oasis and don’t structurally change the platform.

Worth noting, too, that since April 2025, under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act, the CMA has had the power to fine companies up to 10% of their global turnover for breaches of consumer law, without having to go through a court. That is not the DOJ’s structural remedy, but it is a regulatory stick that didn’t exist a year ago. The direction of travel is the same on both sides of the Atlantic.

And the verdict changes the conversation.

For twenty-five years, the live events industry has been able to shrug off the question of ticket pricing with some version of: it’s complicated, platforms are expensive, fees are how the system works. That argument has now been adjudicated in a federal court and found wanting. Twelve people, none of whom work in events, have ruled that the system is not just complicated. It is, in specific and demonstrable ways, rigged.

The interesting thing about a ruling like this isn’t what it does. It’s what it permits.

It permits, for the first time in a generation, someone inside this industry to stand up and say: here is what a ticket actually costs. Here is where the money goes. Here is which bits are defensible, which bits are structural legacies, and which bits probably shouldn’t exist.

My Take

What if we did it?

What if, instead of waiting for the next regulator to force the industry to be transparent, we just were?

Picture this. You’re on a ticket page. Underneath the “add to basket” button is a link. It says “see the full breakdown.” You click it.

It says: £34 to the artist, £11 to the venue, £8 to production, £4 to marketing, £5 to operations, £6 to the promoter, £14.50 to the platform, £3 service charge, £1.50 venue levy, £4.50 VAT. Total £87.

That page doesn’t exist anywhere. Not one major promoter in the world shows you that page. The objection, whenever someone suggests it, is that it would be commercially sensitive. It would reveal the margin. It would give competitors an advantage.

I don’t buy it. Or rather, I buy it, but I think the argument for doing it anyway is stronger.

Because the other thing transparency would do is make visible which bits of the price are the promoter’s fault, and which bits aren’t. Right now, when the ticket is £87 and the experience is bad, you blame the promoter. When the booking fee is £14.50 and you’re in a two-hour queue, you blame the promoter. When the venue is too hot and the bar queue is too long and the train home doesn’t run, you blame the event.

A transparent ticket page wouldn’t just tell you where the money goes. It would tell you who’s responsible for what. And I think, honestly, after fifteen years of being blamed for booking fees I don’t set and platform fails I can’t control, most of us on the promoter side would welcome that clarity.

The £1 Grassroots Levy already proves the basic idea works in this country. One visible, named line item. Money you can follow. Customers don’t resent it. They respond to it. According to Music Venue Trust’s Fans’ Voice Survey, 93% of music fans said they supported the £1 going to grassroots venues. Transparency, it turns out, is quite popular.

Transparency used to be a risk. After April 15, it’s a competitive advantage waiting to be claimed.

Somebody should go first.

This Isn’t Just About Gigs

Most industries that rely on opacity as a business model are, right now, living on borrowed time.

Airlines broke in the 2000s, when comparison sites forced them to show base fares plus taxes plus baggage. Insurance is breaking now, as comparison sites and the FCA’s fair-value rules drag the industry toward publishing what a policy actually costs. Banking is next. Mobile phone contracts are next. Subscription bundling is next. Every industry whose profit margin depends on the customer not understanding the product is running out of road.

Live events is unusually late to the party. Partly because the emotional product is powerful enough to overwhelm the rational objection. You don’t refuse to see your favourite band because the fees annoy you, you just grumble and click pay. Partly because the industry is fragmented and nobody had the incentive to be transparent first.

But the combination of a US jury verdict, a UK regulator’s intervention, and a generation of customers who have been trained by flight comparison sites to expect upfront pricing means the ground is shifting underneath us.

Opacity was a margin strategy in a pre-internet world. It is becoming a liability in a post-verdict one.

One Last Thing

The magic of live events is real. A room of strangers losing their minds to a song they all know is one of the most valuable things a culture produces. I’ll defend that on a tombstone.

But the maths behind the magic is knowable. And there is no good reason those two things can’t coexist.

Here’s a number I keep thinking about. Ninety-two per cent of the artists on the 2024 Glastonbury lineup started their careers at UK grassroots music venues. Last year, 53% of those venues made no profit. Thirty of them closed their doors for good. One hundred and seventy-five UK towns and cities no longer receive regular touring shows. The live music economy in this country is an iceberg, and the bit we argue about most — the cost of a ticket at the top of it — is propped up by a much bigger thing at the bottom that we spend almost no time talking about. That imbalance has a solution. It starts with being honest about the numbers.

The industry has been holding its breath waiting for someone else to go first. After the fifteenth of April, that excuse has quietly expired. Someone is going to publish a transparent ticket page. Someone is going to be the first promoter to stand up and say “here’s exactly what you’re paying for, and here’s why.” That promoter is going to take a hit on margin and a hit on convention. And then they are going to take an enormous bite out of everybody else’s customer trust, and the rest of the industry will either follow them or start bleeding share to them.

That’s the bet. Transparency is no longer the risk. Opacity is.

And somewhere in the middle of writing this I realised: the argument I’m making applies to the company I work for as much as to anyone else.

Sources

Competition and Markets Authority (2024) Investigation into the sale of Oasis concert tickets by Ticketmaster. London: CMA, 5 September.
Competition and Markets Authority (2025) CMA secures changes from Ticketmaster following Oasis tickets investigation. London: CMA, 25 September.
CNN (2026) ‘Jury finds Live Nation and Ticketmaster operated as a monopoly and overcharged fans’, CNN Politics, 15 April.
Department for Culture, Media and Sport (2024) Minister urges live music industry to introduce voluntary ticket levy to protect grassroots venues. London: DCMS, 14 November.
Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024. London: The Stationery Office.
ITV News (2025) ‘Ticketmaster forced to give fans better price information after Oasis dynamic pricing investigation’, ITV News, 25 September.
Music Venue Trust (2025) Royal Albert Hall announced as first 5,000+ capacity venue to adopt the £1 Grassroots Ticket Levy. London: MVT, 21 July.
Music Venue Trust (2026) Annual Report 2025. London: Music Venue Trust.
NME (2026) ‘Over half of UK grassroots venues made no profit in 2025, with 6,000 jobs lost’, NME, 22 January.
NPR (2024) ‘Ticketmaster “dynamic pricing” subject to UK investigation into Oasis ticket sales’, NPR, 6 September.
NPR (2026) ‘Live Nation and Justice Department reach settlement in antitrust case’, NPR, 9 March.
PBS NewsHour (2026) ‘States continue antitrust case against Live Nation and Ticketmaster after DOJ settles’, PBS NewsHour, 16 March.
United States et al. v. Live Nation Entertainment, Inc. and Ticketmaster Entertainment, LLC (2026) jury verdict, US District Court for the Southern District of New York, 15 April.
Washington Post (2026) ‘Justice Department, Live Nation reach deal to settle antitrust lawsuit’, The Washington Post, 9 March.

Note: industry-average cost breakdowns used in this article are composite and directional, not specific to any individual promoter.