Attendance Cost Series

Ticket markets generate enormous quantities of public-facing price information, but much of it is difficult to compare. A listed resale price is not a completed transaction, a premium primary ticket is not ordinary face value, and a historical face-value series may exclude fees that are now displayed up front under newer consumer-protection rules. The Ticket Economics Dataset is intended to preserve these distinctions at the record level so that later research does not have to reconstruct what each price meant.

The minimum observational unit should be a ticket offer or completed transaction tied to an event, venue, observation time and seat or general-admission category. Every record should identify market type—primary fixed, primary premium/dynamic, official resale or third-party resale—and whether the price includes mandatory fees. Where only an advertised “starting at” price is observable, that status should be explicit rather than treated as the event's representative price.

Price fields

The core fields should include face value, mandatory service fees, facility fees, taxes where separately stated, all-in price, quantity, section or admission class, primary/resale status, observation timestamp and sale status. Completed transaction data should be distinguished from listings because willingness to ask and willingness to pay are not equivalent.

The Federal Trade Commission's rule effective May 12, 2025 requires ticket sellers to display the total price including mandatory fees more prominently, which improves current all-in observation.¹ The rule also creates a historical break in data collection: an automated collector may see all-in prices after implementation that were not visible at the same stage of browsing before the rule. Any long-term series must account for that change.

Fees and resale

The Government Accountability Office's 2018 study found that fees averaged 27 percent of ticket price in the primary transactions it examined and 31 percent in its secondary-market sample, while emphasizing that the samples were nongeneralizable.² Those findings are useful as evidence that fees can be economically material, not as a national constant. The Ticket Economics Dataset should enable the same question to be measured repeatedly with a larger documented universe.

Resale also needs transaction status. The Federal Trade Commission's 2026 action requiring StubHub to refund $10 million in fees following allegations over deceptive pricing illustrates the importance of consumer-facing price presentation and the regulatory sensitivity of fee practices.³ Live Index should use public enforcement records to document market rules while keeping the dataset focused on observable prices rather than legal conclusions outside the scope of the underlying action.

Event and market joins

Every ticket record should join to a canonical event, venue, market and artist entity. This enables price analysis by venue capacity, city, artist tier, genre where reliably classified, time before show and inventory type. The dataset should also link to wage and income series for the Fan Affordability Index, allowing ticket economics and household burden to be analyzed with the same event observations.

Privacy and partner data

If Live Index receives transaction-level partner data, personally identifiable information should not be collected unless strictly necessary for a defined research purpose. Audience geography can often be aggregated to ZIP code, county or market level without retaining individual names or contact data. Contractual restrictions on partner data should be represented in the publication metadata so public downloadable datasets do not accidentally expose confidential information.