The ‘Squid Game economics’ of being a fan
As bots and greed hijack the ticket trade, the law is intervening where the free market has failed
A COUPLE of weeks ago, while Wall Street traders were frantically hedging against the latest oil-shock tremors, I was engaged in high-stakes combat of my own. Mouse in hand, palms damp, I was fighting the digital ticketing war for an event in South Korea. My enemies were legion: a virtual queue of 40,000 rivals vying for fewer than 30,000 seats.
Reader, I won. But as I celebrated, the heartbreak of fellow fans left without tickets filled my group chat. It did not help that within hours, resellers were purportedly offering coveted floor seats for this event at several times their face value.
Fans the world over are increasingly at the mercy of a rigged game. Last week, South Korean police dismantled a 7.1 billion won (S$6.1 million) ticket-scalping syndicate. The illegality aside, scalping margins are a stock analyst’s fever dream: a VIP ticket for K-pop group Blackpink’s world tour was flipped for four million won, a mark-up of 20 times the original price.
A growing chunk of ticket sales does not accrue to the people we pay to watch onstage or the companies that put them there – research firm Mordor Intelligence estimates that the global secondary ticket market will hit nearly US$5.2 billion by 2031, up from about US$3.4 billion in 2026.
The hellish economics of fandom make this possible. Thanks to the inexplicable alchemy taking place between eyes, ears and brain, you simply like what you like – one K-pop group is not a fungible substitute for another, and supply is relatively inelastic because the performers are human.
When the product is a rare chance to share oxygen with your idol, demand becomes fuelled by devotion – far more potent than the mere willingness and ability to pay. A concert ticket becomes the least rational purchase a fan makes all year.
Alas, even the industry giants entrusted with policing this scalping chaos are acutely aware of their audience’s captivity. Internal messages at entertainment firm Live Nation which were recently made public in an ongoing trial revealed an employee mocking customers as “so stupid” and bragging about “robbing them blind” with “outrageous” prices for ancillary offerings such as premier parking.
When even legitimate platforms are caught laughing at the customer, it is a stark illustration of how the live events business model is inherently predisposed to predatory behaviour.
Someone with a rock where their heart should be will be unmoved, of course. Concerts are not a necessity, they say, and we should let the bare-knuckle true market price be set by the biggest wallets. But this assumes a fair sale mechanism, which is not what the bot-ridden ticketing hellscape is right now.
I am not denying the immutability of supply and demand in fandom, but where the laws of economics are this unyielding, the actual law should intervene. South Korea is leading the charge, introducing a sweeping ban on all forms of ticket scalping – bot-driven or otherwise – which is set to take effect in the second half of 2026.
One can only hope these laws have teeth. All fans want is a fair fight. If I am to be left standing outside the stadium, I would much rather have lost my seat to a fellow fan who was faster on the draw instead of to a grubby line of code.
