As the UK cools and Melbourne heats up, the artists follow the sun. Olivia Dean has just played Melbourne and Sydney, with more big names heading down under this summer, including Calvin Harris and Zara Larsson. They arrive alongside a familiar companion: ticket prices that seem to climb every year. Underneath sits an economic question. When an artist is wildly popular, who should capture the extra value: the artist and promoter, the scalper, or the lucky fan who got through the queue first?
Dynamic pricing means sellers raise or lower ticket prices in real time based on remaining inventory, demand and other live signals, rather than holding a single face value. The logic starts with a gap. Popular acts often set official prices below what fans would pay, and resellers step in to pocket the difference. Dynamic pricing is the primary seller’s attempt to close that gap itself, so the surplus goes to the artist and promoter instead of a middleman.
Australian Evidence
Whether it works is disputed. Green Day tickets in Sydney reached A$500 under dynamic pricing, and industry insiders and consumer groups do not agree on whether it helps fight scalpers. One Ticketek/TEG executive argued dynamic pricing could even make scalping harder to stop, as state and territory laws already cap resale at 10% above face value. After the uproar over Oasis’s UK reunion sales, where prices reportedly more than doubled under heavy demand, Live Nation, which owns Ticketmaster, said it expected to expand dynamic pricing in Australia.
It isn't only music this is impacting: major sporting events experience similar phenomena, most notably the Australian Open tennis tournament here in Melbourne. Upper-tier/entry-level reserved seats start between $1,499 and $1,999, while prime lower-bowl/courtside seats can dynamically surge up to $8,999 to $10,000+ per seat. Yet the $49 ground pass hasn’t increased since 2019, a fixed-price entry point alongside demand-priced arena seats.
Policy is catching up, though not quite as quick as first announced. In 2024, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese pledged to outlaw dynamic pricing, defined as a price that changes during the transaction https://region.com.au/government-getting-dynamic-about-protecting-consumers-from-hidden-costs/817849. But Treasury’s draft laws introduced no specific dynamic pricing rules, leaving regulation to be assessed under a new general ban on unfair trading practices, bundled with new drip-pricing obligations. Parliament passed the reforms on 2 July 2026, and the prohibition applies from 1 July 2027 https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Bills_Legislation/bd/bd2526/26bd058. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) guidance says dynamic pricing is legal provided businesses are clear about the price and don’t mislead consumers, but the regulator has long argued that consumer law has gaps that a broader ban on unfair trading practices would close https://www.accc.gov.au/business/pricing/setting-prices-whats-allowed.
Backlash
There has been significant backlash against dynamic pricing and reselling, Olivia Dean herself publicly slammed https://au.variety.com/2025/music/global/olivia-dean-blasts-live-nation-ticketmaster-resale-prices-30175/ Ticketmaster, Live Nation, and AEG Presents for allowing exploitative secondary ticketing, extreme price markups, and dynamic pricing on her tours. Resale tickets for her North American dates appeared at over $1,000, some 14 times face value. In a follow-up, she called for every artist and their team to have the option to cap resale at face value before tickets go on sale https://www.musicweek.com/live/read/olivia-dean-secures-fans-partial-refund-over-resale-prices-as-ticketmaster-pledges-to-do-better/093145 and Ticketmaster agreed to cap future resale prices for the tour and refund the markup fans had already paid. Her stance joined a growing wave of artists (including the likes of Hayley Williams, Chappell Roan, Coldplay, and Dua Lipa) pushing back against corporate ticketing monopolies and dynamic pricing models. Resale gouging and dynamic pricing are different problems, and they are often blamed for each other.
Why is Uber Different?
We meet dynamic pricing everywhere: ride-sharing, airlines, online retail, even supermarkets. So why do we shrug at an Uber surge but bristle at a ticket? Behavioural economic frameworks offers four answers.
What you’re actually buying: A ride home is a functional purchase, judged against how badly you need to get home. If it’s midnight, it’s pouring and the last train has gone, paying extra feels like the cost of not getting stranded. A concert is different because it’s tied up with personal identity. When fans see their devotion treated as a pricing signal, it stops feeling like a shared love of an artist and more like a transaction.
Who benefits: Uber frames surges as a way to pull more drivers onto the road, so higher prices visibly lead to more supply. With concerts, the supply of seats is completely fixed, so dynamic pricing cannot magically build more rows in an arena. Because supply cannot increase, fans view dynamic price spikes as arbitrary corporate greed by middleman platforms rather than a tool to improve the experience.
Transparency: An Uber fare is shown upfront, and you can often wait fifteen minutes for it to fall. Ticket sales rely on manufactured panic based on a constrained time horizon. Fans are forced into artificial online queues, watching timers tick down while prices change mid-checkout. This creates a high-stress environment where consumers feel manipulated into making a panic purchase before seats vanish entirely.
Substitutes: If an Uber is too expensive, you can walk, wait or hop on a bus. If you want to see one particular artist, there’s one venue on one night. With no substitute, there’s no real choice, so a price you can’t avoid feels coercive rather than something the market decided.
A Better System
I don't believe that dynamic pricing is the villain. The problem is the combination of fixed supply, no substitutes and prices that move while you’re mid-checkout. Three changes would address that without abolishing price signals.
First, sellers should show the price upfront. Fans should see the all-in price, fees included, before joining a queue, and it shouldn’t change during checkout. That is the target of the government’s push against drip pricing.
Second, cap resale at face value, as Dean’s team demanded of Ticketmaster. If the aim is to stop scalpers, a face-value cap does it directly, whichever side you take on dynamic pricing. The failure in Australia is on enforcement and unauthorised platforms, not the principle.
Third, if artists want to capture the surplus, let them do it openly: published price tiers or auctions, with a block of seats held at a fixed lower price for verified fans. The fan who values the show most pays more but knows why, and the fan on a student budget still has a way in.
Fairness, in the behavioural sense, isn’t about the price level. It’s about whether people can see who gets the extra money and why. A gig can cost more and still feel fair if the system is honest about how it got there.
Zara Spendiff is a third-year Economics student currently studying abroad in Melbourne.
