For Dima Doulov, his breaking point with concert tickets came last September when he was looking to go to the two System of a Down shows at Rogers Stadium, in the north of Toronto.
He bought a ticket to see the reunited 2000s-era metal band at their first show, paying $330 for floor admission next to the stage. When he got to the concert, he was surprised to see the same tickets were selling on secondary sites for around $9 just after the opening act had started.
The next day, he was equally exasperated – and feeling like he had significantly overpaid for his initial purchase – when he went directly to TICKETMASTER’s site and saw the same floor tickets for the second show priced at $130.
The wildly fluctuating prices on both the primary and secondary markets for the two concerts drove home for him the fact that fans are in a pricing game with sellers that they have no chance of winning.
“That was the moment when I realized like, ‘Wow, okay, something is up here,’” he says. “They were marketing the show, both shows, as completely sold out. But the first show was very clearly not sold out and then, the second day, something similar happened.”
The experience spurred Doulov, an avid concert-goer who has worked as a user experience designer for Canada Revenue, to create FaceValue Toronto – a website that aims to help fans decide on whether they should go ahead and buy tickets to shows early, or wait till later.
The site lists larger Toronto-area concerts with face-value ticket prices for different seat sections – as per the site’s name – along with analysis of a host of factors, including historical prices, fan sentiment about the artists, time since the last tour, proximity to nearby dates, and others. Listings then offer a verdict: buy or wait.
The verdict of “wait” for the Wu-Tang Clan show at the RBC Ampitheatre on Sept. 8, for example, was issued on Mar. 23, to coincide with tickets going on sale. The site’s listing says Ticketmaster sold discounted tickets to the rap group’s show during its “Summer of Live” promotion a few months ago, and prices have gone lower since. Thousands of tickets were still available as of Aug. 8, with the listing predicting “room for prices to drop further.”
Doulov’s intention is to counter some of the information asymmetry that consumers are dealing with. Ticketmaster, in particular, pressures fans into quickly buying tickets regardless of price using a variety of methods, including the use of long queues, dynamic pricing, inventory manipulation and fear-of-missing-out triggers.
This pressure is at the centre of a Federal Trade Commission lawsuit in the United States, where Ticketmaster and its parent company Live Nation are facing accusations of using deceptive practices to artificially inflate ticket prices to “deceive” consumers out of billions of dollars. The company denies the charges.
Last weekend’s two Iron Maiden concerts at the Scotiabank Arena in Toronto are a good example of these practices, according to FaceValue. In his post-event analysis on the site, Doulov points out that Ticketmaster listed the first show on Aug. 29 as sold out shortly after it went on sale back in October.
“But, as it turns out, it was a fake sellout with around 1,000 tickets available day-of for both shows,” the analysis says. “The day before the first show, GA Floor tickets became available for face value ($259.25). Once these went back up, they never stopped being available again, meaning the entire time it was ‘sold out’ between October 2025 and August 2026 was a lie.”
It’s the latest example of an increasing trend where additional shows that were planned all along are announced only after a substantial number of tickets are sold to an initial event at inflated prices. To Doulov, it’s clearly inventory manipulation.
“Tickets will often just get held back and the artists then announce added dates,” he says. “Ticket prices then fall dramatically, even for shows that are labeled as sold out.”
Some of FaceValue’s processes are automated, such as linking to Ticketmaster’s application programming interface for basic show information, but the site also requires a good deal of manual work. Doulov manually combs the company’s site for initial face-value ticket prices while his buy-or-wait verdicts, on which he claims a 95-per-cent success rate, are also products of his own analysis.
The process will need to be automated further before FaceValue can expand to other cities, he says, but the website is already his full-time job. He recently added Front Row, a paid tier that gives subscribers access to a Discord server where they can receive personalized advice.
Ticket market experts say FaceValue and similar efforts such as TicketData.com are natural responses to how opaque the buying process has become for consumers. Until governments and regulators take action to fix the market, they’re becoming necessary tools in correcting the information imbalance.
“I think more of this information is generally good for consumers,” says Florian Ederer, a professor of markets, public policy and law at Boston University. “The existence of services like FaceValue and TicketData tells you something important about the ticket market – consumers are hungry for information that the market itself isn’t giving them.”
Policy makers in Canada have so far done little or have been ineffective in efforts to address the issue. Ontario, for example, in May enacted a ban on selling tickets above face value, but the practice is still rampant. The province only issued its first enforcement fine of $25,000 on reseller SeatGeek this past week.
A case seeking the breakup of Live Nation and Ticketmaster brought by the Consumers Council of Canada, meanwhile, is still awaiting the go-ahead at the Competition Tribunal.
As an avid concert-goer, Doulov says he would welcome stronger consumer protection enforcement, but he’s not holding his breath.
“If at the end of the day it’s something that knocks out what FaceValue does, then that’s okay by me because it means that something has actually changed and it’s better now,” he says. “It’s still ultimately an uphill battle for ticket and concert information transparency, where people are left in the dark and having their emotions manipulated to get them to overspend.”
🎧 ON THE PODCAST THIS WEEK:
🥊 COMPETITION
“What we’re not doing is theatre,” says Prime Minister Mark Carney. “We’re not hauling people in and wagging our fingers at them.”
That was the PM’s response to a question about competition this week at a press conference in Thunder Bay, Ont. A reporter asked if Carney was considering any “serious anti-trust” enforcement in response to significant concentration in several sectors of the economy, including banking and telecom.
Rather than performative “theatre,” Carney said his government is instead focusing on effecting structural changes aimed at improving competition on a broader level. The recently announced Food Security Strategy, for example, aims to expand wholesale food distribution so that smaller grocers have more choice and potentially better supplier prices that can then be passed on to consumers.
“The concentration there means our ability to offer cheaper prices is very limited, in fact it’s hindered,” Carney said. “We’re changing the wholesale sector… so that there’s more competition all the way through the food chain.”
Carney cited a similar approach in telecom, where his government last year upheld a decision by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission that gives large telcos including BELL and TELUS wholesale access to each others’ fibre broadband networks.
Telus had appealed that ruling to cabinet and smaller wholesale-based providers warned that it would disadvantage them, but the government agreed with the regulator’s belief that it would increase competition.
“That has helped to contribute to the fall in broadband costs, still one of the biggest expenses that people have,” Carney said at the press conference.
The latest pricing figures, however, contradict the Prime Minister. The CRTC’s industry report released last month show that, while prices for lower speed internet plans have declined since 2021, “most of the faster speed plans (200 Mbps and above) have shown slight increases in price in more recent years.”
Statistics Canada, meanwhile, notes that “on an annual average basis, consumer prices for internet access services increased 2.9 per cent from 2024 to 2025, while the all-items Consumer Price Index increased 2.0 per cent over the same period.”
Carney’s comments on competition start at the 31:26 mark:
🛒 GROCERIES
Speaking of smaller grocers, ALEPH MEATS is accusing MK KOSHER of anti-competitive activity. The Montreal-based butcher business says the dominant certification agency, run by the Jewish Community Council (JCC) of Montreal, is enforcing illegal exclusivity clauses on third-party buyers in the city. In its filing with the Competition Tribunal, Aleph says it “cannot sell its kosher products to most (if not all) large grocery stores, caterers and event venues servicing the Greater Montreal Jewish community, because the respondent, through formal contractual covenants (exclusivity clauses) with them or by way of informal threats, ensures that these third parties will not purchase any kosher product other than those with the MK Kosher Certification.” The JCC and MK have not yet filed response documents. Aleph’s filing is the fourth private right-of-access case since a law change last year made it possible for individuals and businesses to launch abuse-of-dominance actions at the Tribunal, rather than requesting the Competition Bureau to do so. The Tribunal earlier this year dismissed the first filing, a case against Google’s alleged dominance of the search market, and is still deciding whether to allow the other two – the Live Nation case mentioned above, and a complaint over Apple’s app store.
💾 BIG TECH
U.S. regulators are again taking aim at AMAZON, this time accusing the tech giant of secretly overcharging advertisers on its platform. The Federal Trade Commission and 22 states filed a lawsuit this week accusing the company of quietly increasing the prices advertisers paid through its ad auctions, affecting more then a million brands and sellers and resulting in tens of billions of dollars in additional revenue for the company. In response, Amazon says the lawsuit is misguided and “fundamentally misunderstands how advertisers operate.”
And on that very same topic, GOOGLE effectively won an antitrust case this week with the company avoiding having to split off its online advertising exchange. While the judge in the case last ruled that Google has illegal monopolies on the servers that host ads and the exchanges that sit between buyers and sellers, she this week declined to make the company sell the business, known as AdX. Instead, Google will make tweaks to how bidding data on ads is presented to publishers and bidders. As The Guardian notes, the ruling is the third time in recent years that a judge has rejected a bid by U.S. antitrust enforcers to break up a big tech firm, which is “likely to fuel questions about whether courts are up to the task of checking the industry’s unprecedented power over the U.S. economy.” Canada’s Competition Bureau will take its crack against Google and its dominance of the online ad business in front of the Competition Tribunal, starting in January.
🕺 ENTERTAINMENT
In its defence of a class-action lawsuit in California regarding how it sells video games to consumers, SONY looks to be saying out loud the quiet part about digital goods. “In the digital age, it is not plausible to allege that reasonable consumers believed they were obtaining ‘ownership’ of a digital game,” the company argues in its defence filings. The lawsuit, filed last year, alleges that Sony is violating state rules that require “clear and conspicuous” labels warning consumers that they are merely buying a license when they purchase a digital game, rather than actual ownership of the product. The defence statement is adding fuel to anger among gamers over the company’s recent announcement that it will end physical disc production in 2028.
🚨 COMING UP
This Tuesday we celebrate our 50th podcast episode! To mark the occasion we’re bringing back BEN WALDMAN, founder and chief executive of Gander Social, Canada’s newest – and most Canadian – social network. Waldman’s previous appearance on Do Not Pass Go back in January is our most-downloaded ever, and he’s back to fill us in on Gander’s busy summer. The social network (don’t say social media) officially opened to the public this past Canada Day and, as he tells us, the craziness down south only continues to drive interest in the new venture.
Thanks for all this great information, Paul.