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TICKET Act

The U.S. House of Representatives easily passed the bipartisan TICKET Act in a 409-15 vote on Tuesday (April 29), sending Congress’ first-ever regulatory framework for the event ticketing business on to the Senate.
Sponsored by Reps. Gus Bilirakis (R-Fla.) and Jan Schakowsky (D-lll.), the legislation is meant to improve transparency and disclosure of ticket pricing and fees, ban deceptive marketing practices and improve consumer protections by requiring refunds for cancelled or postponed events.

While the legislation introduces long-sought legal protections for artists and fans, some advocacy groups argue that the bill doesn’t go far enough to curb ticket scalping and warn that its language could inadvertently legalize controversial sales practices, including speculative ticket sales.

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“The Ticket Act that just passed the House does not do nearly enough to protect fans and consumers against bad actors,” reads a statement from National Independent Trade Organization executive director Nathan Marro shortly after the bill passed.

At issue is a clause in the bill that Marro and other industry groups like the National Independent Venue Association say create a legal loophole for speculative ticket sales — a highly criticized practice where scalpers sell tickets they don’t actually own, only procuring the tickets after a consumer has agreed to buy them at a substantial markup. Under the language of the TICKET Act a “ticket exchange that does not have actual or constructive possession of an event ticket shall not sell, offer for sale, or advertise for sale such event ticket.” Marro worries that the provision is diluted by a loophole in the legislation which allows secondary sites like Vivid to offer “a service to an individual to obtain an event ticket on behalf of such individual.”

Marro argues that such a service — similar to Vivid’s Seat Saver program, where consumers pay to procure seats before they go on sale to the public, will worsen long-standing public complaints about fair access to tickets.

“Vivid Seats spec ticket ‘seat saver’ program is still 100% legal,” under the current language of the bill, Marro said. “NITO urges the Senate to strengthen this bill prior to passage and we will continue to advocate for stronger protections for our community.”

Stephen Parker, executive director for the National Independent Venues Association, also called out the spec ticket loophole, noting “the inclusion of a ‘concierge service’ carveout, as written in the TICKET Act, would undermine” the legislation. Specifically, Parker asserts that the carve out erodes the trust the public has in the artist — or show presenter — and their ability to fairly and transparently schedule ticket sales. When services like Seat Saver mislead fans into thinking they can buy tickets for high profile events ahead of schedule, Parker says trust in the safety and fairness of the ticket sales process is diminished.

“States across the country have proven that strong, loophole-free ticketing consumer protections work, and Congress should build on that momentum,” wrote Parker, noting that legislatures in Arizona, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota and Nevada all banned speculative tickets sales without carve outs for concierge programs like seat saver.

Parker and Marro have identified other shortcomings with the TICKET Act, including stronger enforcement of the BOTS Act. Marro said his group of talent agents and managers would also like to see greater disclosure around all-in pricing so fans know how much was added to the face value of the ticket by the promoter, the ticketing company and the venue.

The TICKET Act now heads to the U.S. Senate for consideration.

The Fix the Tix coalition is sounding the alarm about the TICKET Act currently making its way through the U.S. Senate, warning that the current bill contains ambiguous language that threatens to undo progress the group has made at cleaning up the event ticket space. Fix the Tix leaders are now urging Congress to work with the group to amend the bill and update language around speculative ticketing, fan clubs and misleading websites.
“While we appreciate the bill’s purpose to protect and inform fans, it contains gaps that, if unaddressed, will undermine both consumer protections and a fair marketplace,” reads the letter addressed to Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who heads the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, which held a markup session for the TICKET Act on Wednesday (Feb. 5).

Reintroduced earlier this year by Senator Eric Schmidt (R-Missouri), the TICKET Act mandates all-in pricing for most ticket sellers, bars speculative ticket listings on sites like StubHub and empowers the Federal Trade Commission to pursue violations of the BOTS Act, which has only been enforced once since passing in 2016, according to songwriter and music industry analyst Chris Castle.

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While groups like the Fix the Tix coalition support the legislation in principle, concerns persist that it “undercuts several strong state consumer protection laws already passed in Maryland, Minnesota, Massachusetts, Nevada, and Arizona,” reads the Tuesday (Feb. 4) letter authored by Stephen Parker, the chairman of the Fix The Tix coalition and the executive director of the National Independent Venues Association. Parker also hints that members of his coalition — which includes The Recording Academy, the National Independent Talent Organization and the Artists Rights Alliance — feel left out and want to play a more active role in the legislative process.

“We encourage the Committee to hold a dedicated hearing or otherwise engage” members of the Fix the Tix coalition, Parker wrote, adding that “their real-life expertise can help craft a stronger, more effective TICKET Act” and noting his dismay with the increasing role the “predatory reseller lobby and the ‘consumer groups’ they fund to do their bidding” have played in drafting the bill.

The legislation’s central weakness comes from what it doesn’t include. In his letter, Parker urges Cruz to “bar predatory resellers from exploiting fan clubs or other restricted presales” and “prohibit listing or reselling tickets before the official public on-sale date” — a practice known as speculative ticketing that has long been criticized by consumer rights groups. In total, Parker offers up a half-dozen prescriptive changes for the bill in order to avoid strengthening the “very abuses it sets out to prevent.”

“We look forward to an open process that prioritizes the views of the artists, fans, and venue community that do all the work and take on all the risk to put on live shows,” Parker concludes.

The letter can be read in its entirety here.

A ticketing reform law meant to clean up the concert industry has been revived in the U.S. Senate after nearly becoming law at the end of last year.
Originally introduced by representative Gus M. Bilirakis (R-Florida), the Transparency in Charges for Key Events Ticketing Act (TICKET Act) would introduce a number of reforms to the ticket-buying process. That includes rules to increase pricing transparency, which would require sports teams and concert promoters to clearly and prominently display the full price of a concert ticket, with fees and taxes added, so that the price they first see is the price they pay at checkout.

The TICKET Act died with the end of the 2023-2024 congressional term but has been reintroduced in the U.S. Senate by senators Eric Schmitt (R-Missouri) and Ed Markey (D- Massachusetts). It heads to the Senate Commerce Committee on Wednesday (Feb. 5) for a hearing.

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The TICKET Act would also mandate refunds for canceled events, ban speculative ticket sales and crack down on the unauthorized use of venues, teams and artists on resell sites designed to confuse fans. Born out of the bungled Taylor Swift ticket sale for her record-breaking Eras Tour — which was crashed by scalpers and billions of bots trying to buy up tickets to flip for profit — the TICKET Act passed the House Energy and Commerce Committee in December 2023 and passed the House in June of last year in a 344 to 24 vote. The bill was even included in the first iteration of the end-of-year Continuing Resolution spending bill signed by former president Joe Biden at the end of last year before eventually being pulled from it.

Whether or not the TICKET Act ends up on President Donald Trump’s desk, one of its key tenets — all-in pricing — was solidified in December by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) when it announced a rule change tackling “junk fees.” The so-called Junk Fees Rule — which also applies to hotel rooms and airline fees — requires total price disclosure including fees for any event tickets listed for sale on the internet.

“People deserve to know up-front what they’re being asked to pay — without worrying that they’ll later be saddled with mysterious fees that they haven’t budgeted for and can’t avoid,” former FTC Chair Lina M. Khan said on Dec. 17, hours after FTC commissioners announced the rule change.

The TICKET Act isn’t the only bill designed to create a more hospitable ticketing marketplace for consumers — though some have claimed that violators of existing laws aren’t being held to account. In September, the National Independent Talent Organization (NITO) sent Khan a letter urging her to begin enforcing the 2016 BOTS Act, which prohibits scalpers from using technology that circumvents “a security measure, access control system, or other technological measure used to enforce ticket purchasing limits for events with over 200 attendees.” The Sept. 9 letter claimed NITO members had attended a ticket resale conference and “observed a sold-out exhibition hall filled with vendors selling and marketing products designed to bypass security measures for ticket purchases, in direct violation of the BOTS Act.”

In July, songwriter and music industry analyst Chris Castle wrote that the BOTS Act has only been enforced one time since its 2017 passage. He went on to argue that the government needs to focus on enforcing its existing laws before moving on to a new regime of legislation that will ultimately go “under-enforced.”