Buying concert tickets has long been a high-stakes affair, with popular events often selling out within minutes.
However, fans are increasingly competing with automated ticket-buying programs, commonly known as bots, that can snatch up seats in seconds before reselling them at higher prices.
This has distorted access not only to concert tickets, but also to everyday services such as booking train tickets.
Buying a ticket has always been “a matter of luck,” said Bryce Sng, a 23-year-old concert goer. Additional competition from the bots”It’s very unfair,” he added. Half the joy of fighting for tickets is the stress, Sng said, because using a robot feels like “it takes away from that experience.”
It’s a feeling shared by nearly 65% of those questioned in a December 2025 survey. by the Consumers’ Association of Singapore, which said ticket scalping was preventing genuine fans from attending events. Participants in the survey’s focus groups also cited bots grabbing tickets within seconds before reselling them at higher prices.
Governments including South Korea and China have responded by tightening rules against automated ticket purchasing.
South Korea expanded its anti-scalping laws on Jan. 29 to target behavior that disrupts the fair purchase of tickets for resale, while Chinese regulators have repeatedly warned third-party platforms against using automated ticket capture software.
On February 12, Beijing market regulators met with 12 companies, including JD.com, Didi and Tencent, over train ticket sales that had attracted “strong criticism from the public. ” In a April 10 announcement, regulators said that seven third-party platforms, including Ctrip, AlibabaIt’s Fliggy and Meituanwere summoned for regulatory negotiations.
In the first three months of 2026, China’s rail system handled more than 1.13 billion trips., according to the National Railway Administration.
Passengers pass through the gate of Fuyang West Railway Station in Fuyang, China, April 29, 2024.
Nuphoto | Nuphoto | Getty Images
Laws are not enoughTicket scalping is an “inevitable function of supply and demand,” said Marc Hershberg, Music Theater International’s director of business and legal affairs.
While banning robots may help to some extent, Sng said policies alone may not be effective.
“Knowing humans, they will always find a different way [around the rules]”, he added.
For businesses defending themselves against bots, there is IIt’s not enough to consider “one signal,” said David Irecki, chief technology officer at data software company Boomi.
Bot detection requires analyzing patterns in user data, including transaction and payment signals, purchase speed, purchasing habits, and credit card activity, rather than relying on a single metric.
To combat bots, Ticketmaster, the leading ticketing platform for many concerts, blocks automated software, identifies and closes fake accounts, and cancels orders that violate its policies.
“Brute force bot attacks…are only part of the battle we are waging against scalpers,” the company told CNBC in an email.
“These are very sophisticated networks that strive to imitate the human behavior of fans to blend in.”
Beyond robotsYet robots are only part of a much larger problem. Hershberg said the limited number of tickets available to the general public often compounds the problem.
End of 2022, Living Nation and its subsidiary Ticketmaster faced widespread backlash after poor management of ticket sales for Taylor Swift’s 2022 “Eras” tour.
The Live Nation website installed on a laptop in New York, USA, Wednesday, April 17, 2024.
Gabby Jones | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Several lawsuits have been filed against the company, alleging monopolistic practices and harm the interests of consumers.
Live Nation has reached a $9.9 million settlement with the District of Columbia in April over allegations that it advertised deceptively low prices before adding mandatory fees and used deceptive tactics creating artificial urgency. Live Nation denied any wrongdoing as part of the settlement.
“For at least a decade, Live Nation and Ticketmaster increased their profits by charging predatory and hidden fees, taking advantage of the fact that Washington, D.C. residents purchased tickets for their favorite artist or team and completely discounted others,” said District of Columbia Attorney General Brian L. Schwalb.
Face value tickets for Swift’s ‘Eras’ tour varied Since From $49 to $450, while VIP packages started at $199 and went up to $899. On the secondary market, some notes were priced between $800 and $20,000 each.
The same problem extends across the entire entertainment industry, Hershberg said.
“Shows like Hamilton … have tickets sold on the resale market for, say, $2,000, but the highest ticket price is around $800 on Broadway. That shows they’re not setting it at an amount that balances the market.”
However, demand far exceeds supply and people are clearly willing to pay higher prices. But producers who want to continue making shows accessible are unwilling to charge prices they consider unreasonable.
Compounding the problem, some consumers don’t realize they are purchasing tickets from online resellers. Hershberg pointed to Broadway.com, a ticket resale platform whose name often leads many buyers to mistake it for an official Broadway ticket distributor. CNBC reached out to Broadway.com but did not receive a response from the company at the time of publication.
The problem goes beyond a simple solution, Boomi’s Irecki said.
“It’s not just a one-size-fits-all tool, because there needs to be regulation or business policy, but it needs to be supported again by well-connected systems.”
Scalpers are the main beneficiaries of these markups, Hershberg added, rather than “the people who bear the risk and the artists and other people working on the show.”
