As FIFA World Cup tickets for games in Toronto circulate in the resale market at soaring prices, they offer a glimpse of a broader challenge facing sports and music fans: demand outpacing supply and access to entertainment becoming a luxury.
And, that pressure is not limited to global and limited-time events. Across concerns, festivals and sports, getting through the venue gate has become a costly and frustrating experience for fans as tickets vanish instantly only to reappear at inflated prices.
Recent examples illustrate the scale of the problem. When Coldplay performed in Toronto in July 2025, fans watched seats disappear on Ticketmaster while waiting in online queues, only to reappear on resale sites for up to $1,600. During the Blue Jays’ World Series run later that year, game tickets surged from roughly $400 to $2,000 within hours.
The trend has proven significant enough that earlier this year the Ontario government stepped into the fight over soaring ticket prices.
“We’re putting ticket scalpers on notice: your days of ripping people off are done,” Premier Doug Ford posted on social media, announcing the proposal of new consumer protections that would make it illegal to resell tickets above face value. The Putting Fans First Act, he proposed, would apply to any platform handling ticket sales – Ticketmaster, StubHub and SeatGeek, for instance – ending what he called the “digital wild west.”
For fans, the message resonated with feelings of being exploited – and not just by the resale market driving up the price of admission.
Pollstar reports that average ticket prices for the top 100 global concert tours rose from $96.17 in 2019 to $132.62 in 2025 – an increase of nearly 38 per cent, compared to average inflation in Canada of about 21 per cent over the same period.
91ŃÇÉ« scholars say that outrage over ticket prices touches something deeper – a marketplace built to capitalize on scarcity, not serve audiences. Their research on cultural economics and digital labour shows the real bottlenecks sit with the ticketing system itself, where platform algorithms feed the frenzy they claim to fix.
While policymakers continue to debate how to respond, there is no clear consensus on how to rein in costs without disrupting the system that funds live events.
Scalpers are part of the equation, but they are not the whole story. Large promotors, ticketing platforms, artists and even fans all play a role in sustaining the current model.
So what caused the market to move in this direction?
Markus Giesler, a professor of marketing at 91ŃÇɫ’s and former music producer who studies how markets shape human behaviour, points to a shift in how the industry makes money.
Prior to the death of the CD and birth of streaming services like Spotify, concerts were largely viewed as a way to promote and support record sales. As streaming platforms reshaped the economics of music – where artists went from earning tangible revenues from CD sales to making a fraction of a penny per stream – touring and selling “merch” became the primary source of income for many artists.
Giesler says this shift in economics, paired with a growing popularity over the last decade of “scaled-up, social media-mediated, massive concert spectacles,” also explains the rising cost of live entertainment.
“The industry noticed large festivals and live music events could be priced differently and be designed at a much larger scale,” he says, noting the bigger the event, the higher the cost, which translates to more dollars in the pockets of artists.
His observation is backed by data from the American Economic Liberties Project, which shows touring rose from 82 per cent of artists’ income in 2010 to roughly 95 per cent in 2022.
However, as touring revenues increased, so did the complexity of how tickets are priced; artists, agents, event promotors, venues and ticketing companies all take a share. Promotors compete for tours based on projected sales, while players like Live Nation – the largest concert promoter worldwide that not only promotes shows, but also operates venues and owns Ticketmaster – can capture revenue at multiples stages of the transaction.
What this means in practice is that the same company can book the show, control the venue and manage ticket sales. Regulators in Canada and the U.S. are now scrutinizing that concentration of power, arguing it may limit competition and continue to drive up costs.
Within this system, ticket prices are set by the artist and their management team. Ticketing platforms sell those tickets on the venue’s behalf and add service fees. A 2019 Competition Bureau review found that, in Canada, those fees exceeded 20 per cent and, in some cases, reached 65 per cent of the original price.
Additional pricing tools have further influenced the market, including Ticketmaster’s “dynamic pricing” model introduced in 2022. This tool – framed as a way to deter scalpers – adjusts prices in real time based on demand, and is widely used for large scale tours.
91ŃÇÉ« economist Matthew Brzozowski, an associate professor at the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies, says limiting resale markets does not eliminate financial risk – it shifts it.
The risk has to land somewhere, he says, noting if it cannot be absorbed through resale, it may show up as higher base prices, additional fees or premium tiers.
Those premiums increasingly are seen at the checkout as priority access, VIP packages and add-ons that resemble insurance.
Despite higher costs, demand remains strong. Researchers say the for many fans, live events can be tied to identity and belonging, making price sensitivity less predictable.
“Desirability is the be-all-end-all,” Giesler says. “We have to get tickets... life is short. Everybody wants to go and everybody wants to be able to talk about it and post about it.”
That dynamic helps explain why costs continue to soar. Even when fans recognize prices as excessive, the draw of shared cultural moments keeps them in the queue.
That kind of momentum is hard to break, even if dynamic pricing is outlawed or companies like Live Nation are taken to task.
“A fan’s identity has always been about devotion,” Giesler says.
And increasingly, showing that devotion means paying the price.
With files from Andrew Seale