Why do concert tickets cost so much these days? And is it all Ticketmaster's fault?

Why is this issue in the news?
Concert ticket prices have risen sharply in recent years. Arena gig tickets have more than doubled, in real terms, since the turn of the century. For the biggest artists, increases have been bigger still. A basic standing ticket to see Oasis at Wembley Stadium on their last tour, in 2009, cost £44 (around £70 adjusted for inflation). The official price, when tickets for the Wembley gig in July went on sale, was £151. The average ticket for Taylor Swift's "Eras" tour in the UK was £206. This has become a political issue, and at the centre of the debate is the role of the world's largest ticket sales company, Ticketmaster, responsible for both these tours. The UK competition regulator launched an investigation into its sale of Oasis tickets, in particular into the use of "dynamic pricing". In March, President Trump signed an executive order promising "to bring common-sense reforms" to ticket sellers in America's live entertainment industry.

Exactly how big is Ticketmaster?
If not a monopoly player, it's a near-monopoly, controlling more than 75% of concert ticket sales at major venues in the US, and about 60% in the UK. In 2010 it merged with the world's largest live events company, Live Nation, which controls more than 265 concert venues in the US; and owns or part-owns the Academy Music Group chain of venues, and festivals from Reading to Latitude, in the UK. Live Nation, now Ticketmaster's parent company, is also a major promoter (organising, funding and publicising music events), putting on 54,000 events last year. It manages artists, too; and it's a big player in advertising and sponsorship, event parking, food and drink sales, merchandise and security. The US Department of Justice describes it as a "live entertainment ecosystem"; Liam Byrne MP, chair of the Commons Business Committee, says it has "more arms than an octopus".

What has it been accused of?
Live Nation "has faced allegations of predatory pricing, misleading fees, restrictive contracts, technical blunders, suppressing or colluding with competitors and generally abusing its monopolistic power", said Dorian Lynskey in The Guardian. Fans struggle to get tickets for big events, often facing technical problems, and long online queues; its app is notoriously awful and glitchy. Pricing is opaque. Which? has complained about the "drip pricing" of extra fees – on a £45 ticket, you might get a £6.10 service charge, a £1.75 facility charge, and a £2.75 order processing fee – making it hard to estimate the final price. As a result, Ticketmaster is very unpopular among fans. The country musician Zach Bryan released a live album called All My Homies Hate Ticketmaster. A poll for More in Common found that 58% of Britons would like to see it nationalised.

What does Ticketmaster say?
Michael Rapino, chief executive of Live Nation, claims that big concerts are still "massively underpriced". He may have a point. Demand is often high, and supply is limited. An estimated 10 million fans wanted tickets for Oasis, so they could have been priced much higher, and still sold out. A live concert is a special experience; people, even on modest incomes, will pay large sums to see acts they love. And many forces have contributed to price rises. The internet has reduced music sales, so artists now depend on concert fees for nearly all of their income; big artists insist on a high proportion of the revenue from ticket sales. Shows have become more spectacular and expensive to stage. Inflation has been high, and VAT is 20%. The ticket price is shared between, in rough order: artist (including crew, transport etc), venue, VAT, promoter and ticket seller. Ticketmaster – or a rival such as AEG – might pick up 10% of the total price. Live Nation says its ticket profit margins are less than 2%. Finally, "scalping" can also drive up prices.

What is scalping?
In the early 2000s, sites such as StubHub launched as legitimate platforms for fans to resell unwanted tickets. But many have been exploited by touts, who buy large numbers of tickets to resell at inflated prices. The problem has been made worse by scalper "bots", which bombard ticketing sites with purchases destined for resale. Such bots are illegal in the UK, but are hard to police.

So is Ticketmaster in the clear?
No. Last May, the US Justice Department filed an anti-monopoly suit against Live Nation; the then assistant attorney general, Doha Mekki, claimed that Ticketmaster is rife with "abuse, exploitation and self-dealing". The case is ongoing; it has been reported that it may try to break up the company. The UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) found that Ticketmaster and Live Nation may have breached consumer laws by selling Oasis tickets at almost 2.5 times the standard price, without explaining that they came with no additional benefits, and by demanding a higher price than initially quoted after a lengthy queuing process.

What can artists do about it?
Many artists – Bruce Springsteen, Taylor Swift, Neil Young – have complained publicly about Ticketmaster. As far back as the 1990s, the US rock band Pearl Jam tried to organise a tour without using the company, but concluded that it was nearly impossible. There are, though, things that artists with substantial followings can do. They can reject dynamic pricing, as Coldplay and Neil Young have done. Or they can go further, like The Cure's Robert Smith. On The Cure's last tour, not only was dynamic pricing rejected, but tickets were priced at as little as £16, and resale was prohibited. Arguably, says Dorian Lynksey, Smith "made things awkward for artists by proving that they set the prices and dictate the conditions" – though they are happy for Ticketmaster to take the blame.

Dynamic pricing
Dynamic pricing, or surge pricing, means the adjustment of prices in real time, based on demand. It's standard practice in many industries – airlines, taxis, hotels – but it has proved controversial in the music industry. It is used in the sale of music tickets, though more commonly in the US than the UK. It appeared to be being used when the Oasis tickets went on sale last year. Fans reported prices more than doubling in the course of a single online queue. Standard standing tickets advertised at £135 plus fees were relabelled "in demand" and changed on Ticketmaster to £355 plus fees. Ticketmaster later denied using dynamic pricing to manipulate prices. It said, instead, that very high demand and long queues meant that cheaper batches of tickets sold out while customers were online, so they were offered the more expensive tickets instead. Critics suggest that, in practice, there is little difference. The CMA said it had not found evidence of dynamic pricing, but that Ticketmaster had made it difficult for Oasis fans to make "informed choices". The watchdog, having asked for some changes to the company's business practices, said in March that its responses were not "sufficient". The investigation is ongoing.

Over recent years, more than 30 countries, including Portugal and Germany, and numerous US states, have either decriminalised or fully legalised recreational cannabis use. Is it time London joined them? The city's mayor, Sadiq Khan, believes so, said Esther Addley in The Guardian.

Last week he endorsed the findings of his London Drugs Commission, led by the Labour peer Charlie Falconer, which recommended that the possession of small amounts of natural cannabis should be decriminalised (under the proposed change, those producing or supplying the drug would still be breaking the law). The current rules, said the report, were wasting police officers' time and souring police-community relations. Black people are four times more likely to be stopped and searched than white people, according to 2024 figures, but are no more likely to be carrying cannabis. Angela Rayner, the deputy prime minister, poured cold water on the proposal, saying the government had no plans to relax the laws on cannabis.

In practice, most cannabis offences have already been "quietly decriminalised" in parts of the country, said Tom Calver in The Sunday Times. In the Thames Valley, just 9% of those caught with the drug end up being charged; in Norfolk, by contrast, about a third do. Whether it's worth formalising that policy, though, is a moot question. In 2001, the commander of Lambeth police, Brian Paddick, briefly ran an experiment by empowering his officers to let off everyone caught with small amounts of cannabis with a caution. The policy saved thousands of hours of police time on processing arrests, enabling officers to focus on more dangerous drugs, but "as dealers flooded the borough, the number of cannabis offences actually rose by a third". A follow-up study concluded that the "total welfare of local residents likely fell" during the period.

As an NHS psychiatrist who witnesses on a daily basis the damage done by cannabis, I think Khan is mad to want to ease the law, said Max Pemberton in the Daily Mail. The drug is to blame for about a third of psychosis cases in the capital, according to one study. If we're going to ease the law, let's go the whole hog and legalise cannabis. That would at least allow the drug to be taxed and regulated, and its level of potency to be kept in check. But Khan's solution represents the worst of all worlds. By keeping cannabis illegal, while making clear that people would face no penalties for taking it, it would merely breed contempt for the law.

Katie Piper was 24 and working as a model when a man with whom she had had a brief relationship hired someone to throw sulphuric acid in her face, said Louise Carpenter in The Times.

She suffered horrific burns, was left partially blind in one eye and had to undergo hundreds of operations to rebuild her face. "My currency had been my beauty and I lost it overnight," she said.

After that, she sensed that she was expected to have only a "mediocre existence": disfigured, dependent on her parents, probably single. That is not how it turned out: 17 years on, she is a well-known TV personality and campaigner for burns victims, and married with two children. She accepts that the attack will always be part of her "story".

"It's not like I'm an actress or a pop star. I came to public attention as a news story, as a victim of a violent crime." And she is aware that her status relies on some "external factors" beyond her control. "For the public, I'm burnt but not too burnt," she says. "I was white, blonde and middle class when it happened to me. I am the kind of victim the public believes."

Yet, all these years on, she refuses to be defined by the actions of her attacker alone. "It's almost as if talking about the attack is attributing what I have achieved to [that man's] actions rather than my own resilience, my own professional achievements or my own choices in the aftermath."