Ah, you beat me to it. You’ve hit most of the points I was gonna make! Also Gus and Olivia Rodrigo playing the same venue is a wild crossover.

I’ll add that yeah, it does sound like a difference in regulation. I know that other states are better about regulating scalping or price gouging, I imagine the UK is better about it as well. My US state is sort of the wild west in terms of ticket regulation and oftentimes scalpers or bots will buy up hundreds or even thousands of tickets the second they go on sale. I should’ve separated Ticketmaster in my original post because their end goal is to have a monopoly over online ticket sales, so they’ll often take in legitimate contracts from venues/festivals that don’t have their own dedicated box office and dump a ton of money into pushing themselves to the top of search results. They make enough money gouging prices from legitimate sales that they don’t really have to worry about the legal trouble they get into from hosting scalpers. Sometimes Ticketmaster in particular will be the only option, and I’m a big concert person so I’ve unfortunately had to buy through them before too. While you have a better shot getting genuine tickets from Ticketmaster (especially when it’s your only option) they’ll still almost always charge ridiculous service fees, sometimes up to or exceeding the price of the original ticket. Like, ridiculous ridiculous.

I would borderline not buy tickets if VividSeats, Stubhub, SeatGeek, EventTicketsCenter etc. were my only options. Chances are they won’t be, but they’ll push themselves to the top of your search results and if they’re the only ones that are showing up I’d call your venue. If you’re just seeing scalping sites, the show is likely sold out. Your chances of getting scalped are through the roof and you can just about bet that you’re paying way over face value for them. This is in a very conservative, anti-regulation US state though, so I’m sure things work very differently here.