Hong Kong must reform ticketing and venue rules to attract touring mega-acts, think tank says
Hong Kong must step up its ticketing systems and ensure promoters can secure venues to attract touring artists, a think tank has said, after finding that most Western artists’ tours skipped the city in recent years.
Out of 95 Western artists’ concert tours between 2023 and 2026 analysed in a report published on Monday by the Hong Kong Future Economy Institute, just 21.1 per cent included Hong Kong.
Almost half of the tours included Singapore, at 49.5 per cent, while Tokyo was on almost three-quarters of the tours, at 74.7 per cent.
“Ed Sheeran played sixteen Asian cities on one tour without a Hong Kong date; Dua Lipa played eight. In total, 75 of the 95 Western tours did not include Hong Kong,” it said.
‘Weaknesses on both fronts’
The report also stated that “the data shows no clear improvement in Hong Kong’s position” since the opening of Kai Tak Stadium, noting that Coldplay was the sole Western act to have played the venue as of April 2025.
Canadian singer The Weeknd had not yet performed at the stadium when the report was compiled. He went on to play four sold-out shows at the venue last month, with his new track “Hong Kong” — which samples a 1993 song by Cantopop icon Faye Wong — topping local charts.
Rising ticketing fraud and short venue booking windows are “weaknesses” that have contributed to the lag behind the city’s regional rivals, the report said.
“Hong Kong has the assets of an events capital: strong policy backing, international connectivity and major new venues. Yet these strengths have not translated into a comparable share of international Western tours,” it said.
“Audiences need to be able to buy tickets with confidence, and promoters need to secure suitable venues while coordinating dates across cities. Our review identifies weaknesses on both fronts.”
The report cited a 62 per cent rise in concert ticket fraud cases between 2024 and 2025, alongside a 202 per cent surge in Consumer Council complaints regarding public performances, rising from 626 to 1,889 over the same period.
Bot purchases and scalping — as well as weak controls and enforcement against those practices — may also have undermined “the reliability and transparency that fans and organisers need,” the report said.
The institute also said that booking rules at government-run venues such as the Hong Kong Coliseum in Hung Hom were “poorly suited” for international tours, pointing to the 12-month window for booking concerts and the lack of a provisional holding system.
The institute recommended that the government modernise ticketing and consumer protection arrangements by raising scalping fines, publishing ticket allocation data, and upgrading platform infrastructure.
It also urged the introduction of a two-year booking window with clear evaluation criteria for international applications, alongside cost-free provisional holds, and called for the publication of approval timelines and booking outcomes.
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James Lee is a reporter at Hong Kong Free Press with an interest in culture and social issues. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in English and a minor in Journalism from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where he witnessed the institution’s transformation over the course of the 2019 extradition bill protests and after the passing of the Beijing-imposed security law.
Since joining HKFP in 2023, he has covered local politics, the city’s housing crisis, as well as landmark court cases including the 47 democrats national security trial. He was previously a reporter at The Standard where he interviewed pro-establishment heavyweights and extensively covered the Covid-19 pandemic and Hong Kong’s political overhauls under the national security law.
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