Labor ‘taking action’ on dynamic pricing after cost of tickets to Lady Gaga’s Sydney and Melbourne concerts sparks outrage

The federal government says it is continuing to work on a crackdown on dynamic pricing, “drip pricing” and hidden fees after prices for even the cheapest tickets for Lady Gaga’s Sydney and Melbourne concerts more than quadrupled soon after going on general sale on Thursday. “There should be no hidden costs that suddenly appear at the end of a transaction and the government is taking action on this,” the arts minister, Tony Burke, told Guardian Australia. The prime minister, Anthony Albanese, made a pledge in October to ban the practice. Thousands of fans queued online on the Ticketmaster site for the Melbourne concerts and the Ticketek site for the Sydney concert on Thursday morning, where advertised prices ranged from $113.06 to more than $1,500. But within 15 minutes of the sale beginning, the “nosebleed” seats, those furthest from the stage in the upper tiers, had risen to $622. On Thursday, Live Nation, Ticketmaster’s parent company, announced that tickets for a second Sydney concert would go on sale on 22 April. Both Ticketmaster and Ticketek have denied that dynamic pricing – where the cost of tickets high in demand continue to rise while people are queueing – is in operation for the Australian Lady Gaga concerts scheduled for December. “Ticketmaster does not have surge pricing or dynamic algorithms to adjust ticket prices,” a Ticketmaster spokesperson said. “Tickets were priced in advance of the sale and set at the individual seat level.” Ticketmaster did not respond to the Guardian queries on how many seats priced at $113 had been allocated to the Melbourne venue before tickets going on sale. Nor did Ticketek respond over the number of $113 seats allocated to the Sydney concert, but told the Guardian on Tuesday its pre-sale tickets were not dynamically priced. Before entering caretaker mode, the Labor government was in the midst of a consultation period looking into how to ban what it called unfair trading practices, including subscription traps, drip pricing and dynamic pricing. “These practices are unAustralian and have a real hit on people’s hip pockets,” the assistant treasurer, Stephen Jones, said in a statement in November. “There won’t be a consumer in the country who hasn’t had an experience with the unfair trading practices that we are planning to ban.” A parliamentary inquiry into the live music sector delivered its final report last month. Included in the recommendations were the amendment of Australian consumer law to better regulate the selling of tickets to live music, by improving the transparency of fees and charges within the price of tickets and limiting the extreme variability in ticket prices caused by dynamic pricing. The inquiry also recommended the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) monitor the Australian music industry “for anti-competitive conduct and take enforcement action as required”. The Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young, who sat on the parliamentary inquiry, said on Thursday: “In a cost-of-living crisis, it is outrageous to see big multinational companies ripping off live music fans and artists. “It’s clear that the big corporate players are making billions of dollars and we need to make sure that local artists, audiences and small-to-medium venues are getting a fair deal.” The ACCC declined to comment on whether it had received any instructions from the government to look into alleged anti-competitive practices in the live music industry. Giving evidence at an inquiry hearing last July, the ACCC said it was closely following the anti-trust lawsuit the Department of Justice had launched against Live Nation in the US. A consumer behaviour academic at the University of NSW’s business school, Prof Nitika Garg, said if dynamic pricing was outlawed in Australia the ACCC would have the power to examine ticketing companies’ confidential data and pricing algorithms. “But there is nothing stopping them from doing it right now,” she said. “The only way to truly confirm it is happening is if somebody buys a seat in a particular section, and then somebody else buys a ticket in the same section at a much higher price later on. “From a consumer perspective, dynamic pricing just adds another layer of consumer anxiety. “Not only are they worried that they might not get seats by the time they are at the front of the queue, they also do not know what their financial outlay might be once they get there.”