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Back to the box office

Why music is rediscovering the fan, and why the way we sell a ticket has become a statement of values.

Many of us still remember it. A Saturday morning queue outside a record shop or a concert hall, a conversation with strangers who liked the same band, and a paper ticket that ended up in a drawer, next to other small treasures. That ticket was proof of something. Not only that we had paid, but that we had been there.

Somewhere along the way, we lost that. The ticket became a QR code, the queue became a virtual waiting room, and the stranger next to us became a bot. This September, two bands, one of the biggest names in British rock and the most exciting Spanish rock act of the moment, have decided to push back. Oasis has abolished its general sale. Arde Bogotá has abolished online sales altogether. I want to explain why these two decisions matter far more than they seem, and what they tell us about the future of the relationship between artists and the people who love their music.

A world with too much music

Let me start with a number. A few days ago, Rob Jonas, CEO of Luminate, said that streaming platforms are now receiving close to 150,000 new tracks every day (Music Ally, 2026). That is one new song every 0.6 seconds. At the same time, around a fifth of the catalogue has barely been played at all in recent quarters.

Herbert Simon warned us about this more than fifty years ago: a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention (Simon, 1971). When music is infinite, what becomes scarce is not the song. It is the listener who stays. The person who buys the record, travels to the gig, wears the T-shirt and brings a friend next time. In an economy of abundance, the fan is the rarest asset an artist has. And for years, the industry has treated that asset rather badly.

How we got here

The problem is not new, but it has become impossible to ignore. When Oasis announced their reunion in 2024, fans spent hours in online queues only to see prices more than double by the time they reached the checkout. The culprit was dynamic pricing: a system, borrowed from airlines and hotels, that raises the price automatically as demand grows. The outrage was such that the UK competition authority opened an investigation (NPR, 2024), and a year later Ticketmaster agreed to give fans clearer pricing information and advance notice of tiered prices (ITV News, 2025).

In Spain, we lived our own version in May 2025 with the Bad Bunny presale. Hundreds of thousands of people in virtual queues, servers crashing before the sale even began, and tickets whose price doubled in a matter of minutes (Xataka, 2025). The consumer organisation OCU filed a complaint after documenting a ticket with a face value of €79.50 that ended up costing €269.30 once fees and extras had been added (Qué!, 2025).

Here lies a paradox that any economist will recognise. Demand for live music has never been higher, yet the experience of accessing it has never been more hostile to the very people who generate that demand. The fan, who should be at the centre of the system, has become its most exposed variable.

Four ways to get closer to the fan

What is emerging now is not one single model but a family of experiments. I see at least four, and each one tells a different story about what an artist believes a fan to be.

1. Friction as a filter: Oasis and Radiohead

For Oasis Live ’27, 38 stadium shows across the UK, Ireland, mainland Europe and the United States, there is no general sale and there are no other presales (TicketNews, 2026). Anyone who wanted a chance had to register on the band’s website before 17 September, choose up to three cities in order of preference and answer a question about the band, such as which album they released in 1995 (El Independiente, 2026). A random draw then assigns personal, non-transferable codes, linked to the buyer’s Ticketmaster account, each one giving access to a specific time slot between 25 and 27 September. Bulk and automated registrations are detected and removed (Ticketmaster España, 2026).

The idea is not entirely new. Radiohead used a similar registration and unlock-code system for their European tour in 2025, and only allowed resale at face value through official platforms. Yet the European alliance for face-value ticketing, FEAT, found 1,751 Radiohead tickets listed on a resale site before the sale had even started, some of them advertised at up to €4,000 (Pollstar, 2025). This is what the industry calls speculative ticketing: selling tickets you do not own yet, betting that you will get them. The lesson is sobering. Friction slows the speculators down. It does not make them disappear.

2. Going physical and going small: Arde Bogotá

The band from Cartagena has taken the opposite path. To present their third album, Manufacturas del Club de la Gente Sola, out on 2 October, they have announced Hervideros: ten concerts in eight Spanish cities, in small venues, inspired by the Boiler Room format, with the audience able to choose between the floor and the stage itself (Al Detalle, 2026). Tickets go on sale on 23 September, only at each venue’s box office, and with a limit of two per person (Telecinco, 2026). No online sale, no virtual queue, no algorithm.

Their explanation is disarmingly simple: it is “the fairest way we can think of for you to experience these very special events with us” (eldiario.es, 2026). And for those who live far from those cities, the answer is equally honest. A much bigger tour will come in 2027.

It is worth pausing on what this model rewards. An online lottery rewards luck. A box office rewards time, proximity and commitment. It is not perfectly fair, because it favours those who live near the venue and can queue on a Wednesday afternoon. But it is legible. Everyone understands the rules, and no software can game them.

3. The price as a promise: The Cure and Coldplay

A third strategy acts on price rather than on access. In 2023, The Cure refused dynamic pricing for their North American tour and only allowed resale at face value. The average ticket cost under 70 dollars, Robert Smith publicly called dynamic pricing a “greedy scam”, and the band cancelled some 7,000 tickets that had been listed on secondary markets (Wikipedia, n.d.).

Coldplay has found an elegant formula with its Infinity Tickets: a small batch of tickets for every show at €20, sold in pairs, with seats allocated at random and collected at the venue’s box office on the day of the concert (Coldplay, 2024). The price is a message in itself. It says: we could charge you more, and we choose not to. In a market where trust has been badly eroded, that restraint is not charity. It is an investment in the relationship.

4. Owning the relationship: direct-to-fan

The fourth strategy goes beyond the ticket. It is about owning the relationship with the audience instead of renting it from platforms: mailing lists, memberships, fan communities, direct sales. Fred again.. has turned this into an art form. For his USB002 project, he announced ten shows in ten cities with the venues revealed only days in advance and tickets released through his website and mailing list, sometimes just hours before the show (EDM.com, 2025). Whoever is on the list, is in. Kevin Kelly anticipated the logic back in 2008 with his famous essay 1,000 True Fans: an artist does not need millions of listeners, but a thousand people who truly care (Kelly, 2008).

The superfan, and why the word worries me

The industry has a name for these people: superfans. According to Luminate, one in five music listeners in the United States now qualifies as a superfan, someone who engages with artists in five or more ways, from streaming to buying physical formats or going to concerts (Luminate, 2026). Goldman Sachs has estimated a potential of $4.2 billion in additional annual revenue if part of this audience were willing to pay more for premium experiences (Music Business Worldwide, 2023).

And here I want to be honest. The word worries me a little. When the superfan becomes simply a customer with a higher willingness to pay, we risk repeating the same mistake with a nicer vocabulary. A fan is not a wallet with feelings. Dynamic pricing was, in a way, the most efficient method ever invented to extract value from superfans. That is precisely why it hurt so much.

The difference between exploiting a fan and taking care of one is not in the technology. It is in the intention.

The fine print

None of these strategies is innocent, and it would be naïve to read them only as generosity. Scarcity is also marketing. A registration process with a random draw produces anxiety, conversation and headlines, and the feeling of a “last chance” is part of the product. Oasis still sells through Ticketmaster. A lottery can leave a lifelong fan out and let a casual one in. A box office excludes those who live far away or cannot leave work at five in the afternoon.

Regulation is also moving, and it will change the rules for everyone. In the UK, the government announced in November 2025 that it will ban resale above the original price plus unavoidable fees, cap the fees of resale platforms, and prevent anyone from reselling more tickets than they were allowed to buy (RPC, 2026). In Spain, the draft Sustainable Consumption Law would also ban resale above face value, turning the ticket, in legal terms, from a speculative asset back into a personal licence to attend (LAW21, 2026). And the European Commission is preparing its own proposal on consumer protection in live events (Futura Tickets, 2026).

When the law protects the face value, the question for artists will no longer be how to fight the touts. It will be a more interesting one: what kind of relationship do we want to build once the speculators are gone?

From audience to community

This, I believe, is where the real shift lies. For two decades, the music industry has optimised for reach: streams, followers, impressions, playlists. Those metrics describe an audience, a crowd that consumes. What these experiments are reaching for is something different, a community: people who share a practice, a language and a sense of belonging.

In innovation studies, we use the notion of the middleground to describe the space that connects the formal institutions that produce and distribute creativity, the upperground, with the informal and passionate communities where creativity is actually lived, the underground (Cohendet, Grandadam & Simon, 2010). Fan communities are exactly that middleground. They are where a song stops being a product and becomes a shared experience. They translate, circulate, reinterpret and sustain the work. For years, the industry treated them as a marketing channel. They are, in fact, part of the value chain.

In an economy of 150,000 new songs a day, an artist’s competitive advantage is not the next track. It is the people who will still be there when it comes out.

So what does it mean, in practice, to take care of the fan again? Let me suggest five principles.

The ticket as a statement of values

Oasis and Arde Bogotá are placing very different bets. One uses technology to bring order to an overwhelming global demand. The other gives up technology to recover a scale where the relationship still feels human. But both have understood something essential: the way you sell a ticket says a great deal about who you think your fans are. Consumers to be optimised, or people to be looked after.

In the years ahead, with more music than anyone could listen to in a hundred lifetimes, that choice may prove to be one of the most important strategic decisions an artist can make. Songs will keep multiplying. Communities will not, unless someone takes care of them.

Perhaps that is why a queue outside a small venue on a Wednesday afternoon feels, suddenly, so modern.

References

 

Manel González-Piñero

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