If you have ever bought a concert ticket on a resale site for several times the face value, you have run into the side of the music industry that the FanFair Alliance was set up to fix. This is a plain-English explainer of who they are, what they have pushed for, and where the UK touting debate currently sits.
Who the FanFair Alliance is
The FanFair Alliance is a UK campaign group launched in 2016 by a coalition of artist managers, industry figures, and consumer voices. Its founding aim was straightforward: stop the secondary ticket market from extracting money out of fans for tickets that primary sellers had not been able to charge for in the first place.
The group is not a regulator. It is a campaign body, working through public pressure, parliamentary lobbying, and coordinated artist statements. Its membership over the years has included senior managers behind some of the biggest UK touring artists, alongside venue operators, agents, and trade associations.
What they have campaigned for
FanFair\'s positions have shifted over time, but the core demands have been consistent:
Mandatory information at the point of resale. If a ticket is being resold, the seller should have to disclose the original face value, the seat or section it relates to, and any restrictions attached. This is partly law in the UK already, through the Consumer Rights Act 2015, but enforcement was patchy for most of the 2010s.
A cap on resale prices. The group has long argued for a price cap, typically set at face value plus a small handling fee, on any ticket resold through a regulated platform. This puts the UK in line with countries like Italy, France, Belgium, and Ireland, all of which have some form of resale price restriction.
Action against industrial-scale touts. A handful of professional resellers have run businesses worth tens of millions buying tickets in bulk and reselling them. FanFair has pressed for criminal prosecutions, and has supported the work of National Trading Standards on the touting beat. Several high-profile prosecutions in 2019 and 2020 followed.
Platform accountability. Secondary sites like Viagogo and StubHub have historically argued that they are marketplaces, not retailers, and therefore not responsible for the listings on their platforms. FanFair has pushed back on that distinction, arguing that the platforms profit from the markup and should be held to the same disclosure standards as primary sellers.
The state of UK law
UK law on ticket touting is a patchwork. Reselling tickets to football matches has been a criminal offence under the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 since the late 1990s. For other live events, including music and theatre, resale is legal, but subject to consumer law disclosures.
The Digital Economy Act 2017 introduced a specific offence for using bots to buy tickets in bulk, partly in response to FanFair\'s campaigning. The Consumer Rights Act 2015 already required disclosure of seat number, original price, and restrictions at the point of resale, but enforcement was the weak link.
Since 2018, several big platforms have either changed their disclosure practices or been hit with court orders to do so. In 2020, Viagogo acquired StubHub, creating a single dominant secondary marketplace, which prompted further regulatory scrutiny by the Competition and Markets Authority.
As of 2024 and into 2025, the Labour government has signalled support for further restrictions, including a possible price cap on resale, although the exact form of any new law was still under consultation at the time of writing.
Why fans should care
Even if you have never tried to resell a ticket, the rules around resale shape the price you pay at the original sale. If touts can buy in bulk and flip for a multiple, primary sellers have an incentive either to crank up their own prices or to take some of that secondary margin themselves through "platinum" or "dynamic" pricing.
The cleanest version of the live events economy, the one FanFair has pushed for, is one where face value is honest, resale is constrained, and the gap between what an artist set the price at and what a fan ends up paying is small. Whether the law gets there is still an open question.
What primary platforms can do
The choices a primary ticketing platform makes also shape the secondary market. Platforms that lock tickets to the buyer\'s name, or that run their own face-value resale at the original price, make it harder for industrial-scale resellers to operate. Platforms that issue freely transferable PDF tickets make it easy.
At tickts, all tickets are tied to the buyer and event, and our policy on resale is that any ticket sold through us cannot be resold for a profit on a third-party site without breaching our terms. The mechanism is not perfect, but it is one piece of the wider answer that FanFair has been pushing for over the last decade.