Radiohead will play 16 arena shows across Perth, Melbourne and Sydney in May and June 2027, the band and promoter Frontier Touring announced at 5pm on Monday, and none of the tickets will go on general sale. Fans have until 5pm AEST on Thursday to register, codes for a single city go out on 15 September, and the band's site promises that "the ticket price will stay fixed and not change dynamically".
The run opens with four shows at RAC Arena in Perth from 3 May, then six at Rod Laver Arena in Melbourne from 13 May and six at Sydney's Afterpay Arena from 25 May, closing on 1 June. It is the band's first Australian visit since November 2012, when they played Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne. Standing tickets are $199 including fees, seated tickets run from $139 to $349, and a "Fast Track Status" package is $649. The prices are the same in all three cities. A $2 donation in each ticket goes to Greenpeace Australia Pacific and the Australian Marine Conservation Society, and the band will match the total.
Registration is the whole sale. Every completed registration lodged by the deadline is treated equally, Frontier says, and "there's no benefit to registering earlier". Confirmation emails go out on Friday, unlock codes at 7am local time on Tuesday 15 September, and the purchase window runs from 9am that day until 9am on Thursday 17 September or until the tickets are gone. A code buys up to four tickets in one city only, and does not guarantee any. Melbourne is ticketed by AXS, Perth and Sydney by Ticketek. Resale is limited to the ticketing platform's face-value facility, and the band says tickets or codes offered above face value "will be monitored and subject to cancellation".
“These days, buying tickets can mean you competing in a queue filled with bots and ticket scalpers who have an unfair advantage," the band's FAQ says. "The registration is in place to verify that you are who you say you are." Radiohead's manager Julie Calland described the same model last September, ahead of the European tour, as "an attempt to deliver tickets as fairly as possible directly to fans at the prices the band intended", and conceded it was "not a perfect science".”
In Australia the legislation she was waiting for was promised and then did not arrive. In October 2024, after Four Corners reported that Live Nation's dynamic pricing had pushed some Green Day tickets to $500, the Albanese government said it would ban the practice. The bill that eventually passed, the Competition and Consumer Amendment (Unfair Trading Practices) Act, received assent on 6 July this year and bans drip pricing and subscription traps from 1 July 2027, with penalties of up to $100 million. It contains no clause on dynamic pricing. Treasury's exposure draft in February dropped the specific prohibition and left the practice to be judged under a general ban on unfair trading, as the law firm Allens noted at the time. Assistant Minister Andrew Leigh said when the bill was introduced that businesses "should succeed by offering better products and better service, not by building more cunning traps".
The shows also test a changed ticketing market. Frontier Touring has been half-owned by the US promoter AEG Presents since July 2019, and in April Melbourne Park switched the year-round ticketing for Rod Laver Arena from Ticketek to AXS, an AEG company. The Melbourne dates are therefore promoted and ticketed by companies under common ownership, with the price and resale terms set by the band rather than the platform.
Registration does not stop everything. Days before the general sale for the 2025 European tour, the Face-value European Alliance for Ticketing found 1,751 apparently speculative listings on a resale site, some at nearly 4,000 euros. And for a fan who could travel to any of the three cities, the system chooses for them: one code, one city.
Registration closes at 5pm AEST on Thursday 10 September. The codes arrive the following Tuesday, and Perth goes first, on 3 May.
