It should be simple enough: select tickets, add to basket, and pay.

But for popular acts that is sometimes wishful thinking.

Live agents, promoters, consultants and venue managers have all shared their insights with us - revealing why ordinary fans sometimes battle against the odds to see the musicians they love.

There’s "no real golden rule" for how many tickets go on general sale, says Martin Haigh, a former head of Ticketmaster Asia who still works in the industry. It will depend on the artist and things like sponsorship deals. “There are a lot of stakeholders involved,” he adds.

Haigh says it is not a conspiracy against the public.

"These are commercial relationships done. If you are a fan of Adele and you are signed up to Adele's fan club, and in there they say you have potential to get hold of tickets before other fans, then that's the compelling reason to join that fan club," he says.

But the shortage of seats isn’t the only problem you will face when the tickets go on sale.

The touts are the target of the latest UK government proposals.

The methods they have been using to get large numbers of tickets have become increasingly sophisticated in recent years.

Some use bots - software that can perform repetitive tasks really quickly - to create multiple identities, IP addresses and email addresses all making it harder for ticket sellers to identify bulk buyers, Walker told the BBC's File on 4 Investigates last year.

More recently, Walker told us the appearance of AI-generated fake identities has made the problem worse. "These are incredibly difficult to detect and basically this is devastating systems,” he adds.

Even when ticket companies put systems in place to try to block the touts' software, the touts quickly find ways to bypass them. It can take them as little as 30 minutes to do it, Walker told File on 4 Investigates.

In 2023, Ticketmaster’s parent company Live Nation spent more than $1bn (£760m) combating bots, according to Joe Berchtold, its chief financial officer. He described the problem as "an ever-ongoing arms race in terms of fighting the bots".

Once touts get their tickets, they can then use secondary ticketing websites to sell them on - typically with a mark up of more than 50%, according to Competition and Market Authority (CMA) analysis.

New research from Which? magazine found that some tickets to see Oasis at Wembley Stadium this summer were listed for as much as £4,442.

To stop this, the government is planning to limit the price that tickets can be resold for, to the "original cost", or face value, capping extra fees added by resale platforms "to prevent the price limit being undermined". It will also ban individuals from reselling more tickets than they were entitled to buy in the initial ticket sale.

Resale platforms will have a legal duty to monitor and enforce the new regulations.

But for now, nothing is changing.

The government’s proposals - a week after dozens of artists including Sam Fender, Dua Lipa and Coldplay urged the prime minister to protect fans from exploitation - need to go through Parliament before they can become law.

So, your friends failed to get the seats they wanted? They won’t be seeing their favourite band playing live? Or so they thought.

More tickets can sometimes be made available to meet the demand, explains one of Ed Sheeran’s tour promoters, Stuart Galbraith, owner of promotion company Kilimanjaro.

The show might have changed some of the staging and more sightlines could have opened up, he explains, "then we will put more tickets in the marketplace".

“So it is possible for a show to go on sale, 'sell out' as you say, instantly,” says Galbraith, “and then more tickets are made available nearer the time”.

We don’t know yet how the government's planned changes to ticket-resale rules might affect the industry. Resale sites have warned a price cap could push customers towards unregulated websites and social media, putting fans at increased risk of fraud.

However, industry group UK Music has welcomed the proposals, stressing that the industry "relies on that strong relationship between music fans and the artist" to survive.

Design by Matt Faraci & So Dam Jung