ticketing legislation
The 2024 Democratic National Convention has had its fair share of flashy moments – from Lil Jon’s “Turn Down for What” cameo during roll call to Patti LaBelle’s gorgeous rendition of “You Are My Friend” — but the primetime show isn’t the only thing happening in Chicago this week (Aug. 19-22).
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In addition to the main event, which takes place in Chi-Town’s United Center arena, the morning and afternoons are filled with different council and caucus meetings that fire voters up, educate them on grassroots campaign strategies and break down the party’s 2024 platform. Billboard was able to sit in on Tuesday afternoon’s youth council meeting (Aug. 20), where Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Vice President Harris’ running mate, made an appearance to remind young voters of their power and responsibility for their own futures now that Dems are seemingly passing the baton along to a new generation.
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Before Walz took the podium, Texas Rep. Greg Casar addressed the room, and by the end of his remarks, nearly every delegate in the room was on their feet. “It is going to be your energy and your work that is necessary to deliver the transformational change that the vast majority of this country wants,” he proclaimed. “Too often we confuse the political center with the moral center!” Casar, who currently represents Texas’ 35th district and was formerly endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America, was connecting — and he was connecting with the country’s newest and youngest voters.
Though he only joined Congress about two years ago, Casar has certainly made his progressive presence felt – from leading a nine-hour thirst strike in 2023 to urging President Biden not to recognize the coalition claiming victory in the 2024 Pakistani general election.
Billboard caught up with Rep. Casar after the youth council to talk about some key pieces of music legislation currently floating in Congress, his understanding of “brat summer,” and his love for Grupo Frontera and Peso Pluma.
What are your thoughts on the RAP Act? Can you commit to supporting it in the House?
I’m a supporter of the bill. Before being in Congress, I was on the Austin City Council and led on a lot of music issues in what is the live music capital of the world. I really came to understand during the pandemic that supporting both recording artists and live music is important not just for those industries and not just for music lovers but [also] for building community and joy, and making expensive cities worth living in in the first place, you know.
I think Leader Jeffries and Vice President Harris have embraced pop music, and hip-hop in particular, as part of their events, and as a part of their shared identity with so many of our communities. I hope that we can remind them of that as we prioritize bills like the RAP Act, because it’s not only a clear civil rights bill, but we [also] want people to be able to express themselves without being worried that it’s going to be used in a court case against them. I think that Speaker Jeffries and [Vice] President Harris would be supportive, not only because they understand the importance of hip-hop to American culture, but also because they’re civil rights-first elected officials.
In light of the DOJ suing Live Nation-Ticketmaster, where do you stand on the Fans First Act?
I’m trying to remember the details of Fans First versus all the different ideas on how to crack down on monopolies in the ticketing industry, [but] I’m just generally supportive of whatever it is that we can get done to make it easier to buy tickets, and for more of that money to actually get to the people that make the music and do the tour.
I find that people in places like Austin are actually increasingly happy to pay a decent cover if they know that it’s going to the artist then. So whatever it is that we can do to take on monopolies in the music industry I think is really important. It’s the same problem we have with meat; only four companies control nearly 90% of the meat in the country. The same issues we have in tech we have in music as well.
In that vein, what was the last concert you went to?
I always make sure that when I’m back home in Austin, I go see some shows. Last night, [I got to see] my friend Gina Chavez, who’s a Latin Grammy nominee, play live here. The weekend before that, we had Hot Summer Nights in Austin where a bunch of our clubs on Red River were opened up for free shows, so it was awesome to see a bunch of acts play there.
I just missed seeing Grupo Frontera in Austin because I was over here. I’m a big fan of Grupo Frontera and Peso Pluma. It’s just been awesome to see them really break out. Peso Pluma actually went to middle school in my district in San Antonio for a little while; he was between Mexico and San Antonio. A bigger arena show that I’ve been to recently was Burna Boy. For my birthday, we saw Chicano Batman. They played the 9:30 Club. People catch me at the $25 shows! Also, Thundercat! I’ve seen Thundercat twice in D.C.
What do you think of the Harris-Walz campaign’s embrace of pop music? Do you think it ever veers on the side of pandering, or do you think that they have their finger on their pulse in a smart and balanced way?
I think that you just got to have fun with it, man. If a politician likes that song, good for them! I think that the more we can be our real selves and realize that we’re just normal people, that’s gonna speak for itself. If I’m at your house, put on your playlist, don’t put on the playlist you think I’m going to like. Put on your stuff!
You get that feeling from this campaign? That they’re putting on their playlists?
I think they’re putting on what they like, and I would encourage them to really get relaxed with that. I think people are looking for authenticity.
How do you understand “brat summer?”
[Laughs.] I feel like its meaning has been contorted and twisted, you know? It started out [with] Charli XCX having a good time, then it turned into everybody having a good time. And now Kamala Harris might be president!
What is your personal song of the summer of 2024?
There’s this Karol G song, “Si Antes Te Hubiera Conocido,” it’s a great one. I’ve been on some long drives this summer, and it’s one of the ones that I [replayed] a decent amount. It’s hot in Texas, like 105° today, so it’s a good “rolling down the windows” and “chilling on the lawn” song.
The Maryland bill targeting speculative ticketing in the state was signed into law by Gov. Wes Moore today. The consumer protection bill focuses on the sale and resale of live event tickets and was supported by the Recording Academy, National Independent Venue Association (NIVA), National Independent Talent Organization (NITO), Eventbrite and more.
The bill bans speculative ticketing (the practice of listing tickets on secondary sites before a reseller owns a ticket), as well as require ticketers to present “all in” pricing for consumers, meaning the full price of the ticket — including all fees — must be present in the price first shown to fans. The law will go into effect on July 1.
“In addition to Senators [Dawn Danielle] Gile and [Pamela] Beidle and Delegate [C.T.] Wilson, we’re also grateful to Marylanders who spoke out and let their elected officials know that they want protection from parasitic scalpers who use acts of deception to gouge concert fans,” said Audrey Fix Schaefer, communications director of Merriweather Post Pavilion and I.M.P. in a statement. “Nearly 17,000 letters were sent by Marylanders to their state legislators, letting those in Annapolis know they want protection from the rampant deception and abuse that’s taking place now. We applaud the entire State legislature for this groundbreaking legislation, and we look forward to working with the Attorney General’s office to help ensure enforcement.”
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The bill requires resellers to provide the zone and seat number for non-general admission events, eliminating the common practice of resellers listing an unspecified seat and procuring a ticket — for a lesser price — once a consumer has purchased the “unspecified” seat from a secondary site. It also reduces resellers’ ability to list generic tickets on resale sites before on-sale for the actual event has occurred.
A standout of the bill for proponents like NIVA, NITO and others, is that the bill makes it illegal for secondary ticketing platforms to provide a marketplace for the sale or resale of tickets that violate the law. If a consumer purchases a ticket that is counterfeit, canceled by the reseller or fails to meet its original description, the secondary platform would be responsible for paying the consumer back for the total amount paid, including any fees. Platforms selling or offering to sell speculative tickets can be fined up to $10,000 for the first infraction and $25,000 for each subsequent infraction.
Additionally, the bill mandates “all-in” ticket pricing — where consumers see the full price of the ticket, including fees, from the beginning of their transaction — and require those fees to be itemized so fans know where their dollars are going. The passage of the bill also means Maryland’s attorney general’s office can conduct a review of how resellers are procuring their tickets, the price difference for fans on the primary versus secondary market, fraudulent tickets, the use of bots, what measures other states have enacted to protect consumers during the ticket buying process and more.
The AG’s study is scheduled to be completed by the end of the year.
A controversial California Assembly bill that would have forced Ticketmaster to share its ticketing inventory with resale sites StubHub and SeatGeek has been amended with anti-resale provisions that would allow promoters like Live Nation to ban Stubhub and SeatGeek from selling its concert tickets in California.
The whiplash legislative maneuvering is the result of the music industry’s successful effort to thwart Oakland lawmaker Buffy Wicks’ attempt to address long-standing consumer complaints against Ticketmaster, forcing her to significantly water down the legislation.
The original version of the bill was introduced on April 8, when Wicks held a press conference with the California Consumer Federation and members of several state Chamber of Commerce groups and unveiled a plan, endorsed by StubHub and SeatGeek, to “make the ticket market more competitive.” To accomplish this, the bill proposed to outlaw Live Nation’s use of exclusive venue contracts, which Wicks said gave the company an unhealthy 80% share of the concert market and had led to a steep price increase for tickets since the company’s merger with Ticketmaster in 2009.
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Wicks’ bill also included a clause — shocking to many in the live entertainment space — that would have required Ticketmaster to develop software integrations allowing rival ticketing companies and ticket resale sites to pull ticketing inventory from the Ticketmaster site and sell it on their own sites. Wicks said she wanted to create a Kayak.com-style marketplace for tickets, where sites like StubHub and SeatGeek, along with smaller primary ticketing companies like Dice and Tixr, sold the same concert tickets Ticketmaster was selling.
The proposal was immediately opposed by professional sports teams including the Golden State Warriors and the San Francisco 49ers, along with concert promoters, venue operators, arts groups and a number of live music industry organizations including the National Independent Venues Association, the Recording Academy and the Music Artist Coalition. Critics said the bill stripped California venues of their rights to monetize their ticketing contracts and transferred the power to control how tickets were sold from artists and venues to third-party technology companies without any safeguards.
Wicks explained that the bill would help consumers by making ticketing companies compete to sell tickets, but opponents said sellers would still be incentivized to raise ticket prices for major concerts when demand significantly outpaced supply. Others argued that giving resale sites direct access to primary tickets would push more tickets into the hands of scalpers and cause prices to skyrocket.
Booking agent Sam Hunt with Wasserman Music described the bill as problematic during an April 16 subcommittee hearing, warning that it “punished artists” and “established a dangerous system for fans.”
“Artists agree that the ticketing process is deeply flawed,” said Hunt, before adding that the blame lies with “unregulated ticket brokers” and “the secondary platforms that allow them to exist and flourish.”
Facing universal opposition from the live music industry and several members of the committee, Wicks vowed to make changes to the legislation.
On Tuesday (April 24), during a hearing of the Assembly’s Privacy and Consumer Protection Committee, Wicks introduced a new, partially completed bill that exempted professional and collegiate sports teams from the new rules. More notably, it included a clause stating that it would be an artist’s decision “to determine the terms and conditions related to the sale, pricing, distribution and transfer of tickets to their events.”
That new language, which mirrors that of legislation in other states as well as proposed federal legislation, was interpreted to mean that artists would be given the right to block resale sites from selling their tickets, potentially ending the resale of concert tickets in California — a sharp contrast with the original bill.
Wicks said the amendment resulted from a compromise with other legislators and was still being revised and amended. Lobbyists for secondary sites like StubHub and SeatGeek testified that they would pull their support for the bill if the new language remained.
Wicks isn’t the only politician tackling ticketing initiatives. Since the high-profile crash of the Taylor Swift Eras Tour ticket sale in November 2022, Ticketmaster has come under fire from members of both parties in Congress and is reportedly the subject of a DOJ investigation on antitrust charges. State lawmakers across the country have largely tried and failed to pass legislation curbing Ticketmaster’s power, but few have swung and missed quite like Wicks, who initially chose to align her efforts with the secondary ticketing market.
Today’s modern live music industry is a diverse cross-section of competing multinational corporations and independent businesses made up of venue operators, talent agencies, concert promoters, artists and their managers, and primary ticketing companies. The broad group of competing interests doesn’t agree on much, except for their universal opposition to the ticket resale business, which many believe caused the Swift ticket sale crash. The bot attack that preceded the temporary disruption of the sale had all the hallmarks of similar attacks utilized by ticket scalping groups.
In its defense, reps for the secondary ticketing business argue that sites like StubHub and SeatGeek provide a safe marketplace to buy and sell tickets that has been embraced by consumers and duplicated by Ticketmaster, which operates its own resale business.
The friction between the music industry and the secondary market involves access to high-demand concerts by artists like Swift and Olivia Rodrigo. Lobbyists for resale sites say Ticketmaster unfairly blocks ticket resellers from accessing high-demand tickets. Ticketmaster officials argue their artist clients want their tickets to be sold directly to fans and not marked up on resale sites.
Following the introduction of Wicks’ revamped bill in California, a new round of debate ensued. During the committee discussion of the legislation, Assemblymember Isaac Bryan said that Wicks’ logic that a Kayak.com site would push ticket prices down was flawed, noting that with hotels, “There’s no secondary market to sell a room for two, three or four” times what was originally paid to book the room.
Assemblymember Lori Wilson added that Wicks should focus her efforts on determining whether Ticketmaster held a competitive or unfair advantage. Committee chair Rebecca Bauer-Kahan said legislators needed to focus on putting consumers first, adding, “We as a committee don’t necessarily think the largest problem is the monopoly at the front end but the brokers in the middle who are buying up the tickets and leading to a lot of the problems” in the marketplace.
Despite these reservations, the new, radically different legislation will move forward. After a brief vote, the rewritten bill passed in the Privacy and Consumer Protection Committee and now heads to the Appropriations Committee, where Wicks serves as chair.
More than 250 artists including Billie Eilish, Lorde, Fall Out Boy, Diplo, Becky G, Green Day, Sia and many more signed an open letter on Thursday (April 25) to the Senate Committee on Commerce urging Congress to pass the Fans First Act. The artists argue that the bill advocating for consumer protections against bots and more transparency in ticket sales is vital to the survival of the live music business.
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“As artists and members of the music community, we rely on touring for our livelihood, and we value music fans above all else,” the letter opens. “We are joining together to say that the current system is broken: predatory resellers and secondary platforms engage in deceptive ticketing practices to inflate ticket prices and deprive fans of the chance to see their favorite artists at a fair price. Predatory resellers have gone unregulated while siphoning money from the live entertainment ecosystem for their sole benefit.”
The letter says that these predatory sellers use illegal bots, speculative ticket listings and deceitful advertising that causes real harm to consumers. “The relationship between artist and fan, which forms the backbone of the entire music industry, is severed,” the letter warns. “No one cares more about fans than the artists. When predatory resellers scoop up face value tickets ahead of fans in order to resell at inflated prices on the secondary market, artists lose the ability to connect with their fans who cannot afford to attend.”
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The Fix the Tix letter argues that fans are lured in by deceptive URLs and ads that “disguise resale and trick consumers into playing up to 20x face value” when face value tickets are still available from the venue, as well “predatory” resellers listing tickets for shows before they go on sale — before they even have tickets in hand — which often result in fans showing up to venues without a valid ticket.
“Predatory resellers do not invest in creating a great live experience or fostering the live musicecosystem – they simply profit off of the hard work of artists, venues and the crew,” it reads. “In fact, resellers and secondary ticketing platforms often profit more from the artist’s work than the artists themselves.”
The signees advocate for the bipartisan Fans First Act — introduced in December by Senators John Cornyn, Amy Klobuchar, Marsha Blackburn, Peter Welch, Roger Wicker and Ben Ray Lujan — which would ban fake tickets and deceptive marketing tactics, as well as requiring ticket sellers to show the full, itemized price of a ticket from the moment the transaction begins, with clear penalties and enforcement to back the bill up.
“We, as artists, as music lovers, and as concert attendees ourselves, urge you to support the Fans First Act to combat predatory resellers’ deceptive ticketing practices and the secondary platforms, which also profit from these practices,” the letter concludes. “Predatory resellers should not be more profitable than the people dedicating their lives to their art.” The letter was addressed to Sen. Maria Cantwell, the chair of the Senate Commerce, Science & Transportation Committee and the panel’s ranking member, Texas’ Ted Cruz, with Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer, minority leader Mitch McConnell, Cornyn and Klobuchar cc’d as well.
Among the other signees to the letter include: Aimee Mann, Finneas, Evanescence’s Amy Lee, Nile Rodgers, OK GO, Halestorm, Becky G, Graham Nash, Goose, Pixies, Particle Kid, Ben Folds, Rickie Lee Jones, Jason Mraz, the members of Duran Duran, Bright Eyes, Julia Michaels, Cyndi Lauper, Sylvan Esso, Major Lazer, MGMT, Yes and many more.
Elected officials in Maryland are currently moving a ticketing reform bill titled SB0539 through the state legislature, with approval from both the House and Senate pending. The proposed law is a consumer protection bill aimed at the sale and resale of live event tickets that has been endorsed by the Recording Academy, National Independent Venue Association (NIVA), National Independent Talent Organization (NITO), Eventbrite and more.
The current iteration of the bill would ban speculative ticketing (the practice of listing tickets on secondary sites before a reseller owns a ticket), as well as require ticketers to present “all in” pricing for consumers, meaning the full price of the ticket — including all fees — must be present in the price first shown to fans. The bill would pertain to concerts, theater shows and live sporting events.
Based on the bill’s language, resellers will have to provide the zone and seat number for non-general admission events. This would eliminate the common practice of resellers listing an unspecified seat and procuring a ticket — for a lesser price — once a consumer has purchased the “unspecified” seat from a secondary site. It would also reduce resellers’ ability to list generic tickets on resale sites before on-sale for the actual event has occurred.
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Audrey Fix Schaefer, vp of the board of directors and communications director for the National Independent Venue Association (NIVA), tells Billboard that fans regularly search online for concert tickets for shows promoted by I.M.P. — where she also serves as communications director — and are directed to misleading secondary sites that mark up the price or offer tickets for events that haven’t yet gone on sale.
“It’s fraud,” she says. “It’s unregulated arbitrage that deceives fans into thinking that they have to overpay because they can’t get a ticket through us. They figure that it sold out when the tickets haven’t been put on sale.”
Fix Schaefer gives the example of Mitski’s upcoming tour, which will make two stops at I.M.P.’s Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, Md., later this year. For those shows, $125 tickets were being advertised on secondary sites for $12,000 before the actual on-sale. “That’s obscene,” she says, and “there isn’t a single show [resellers] don’t do this on.”
The Maryland bill would also make it illegal for secondary ticketing platforms to provide a marketplace for the sale or resale of tickets that violate the law. If a consumer purchases a ticket that is counterfeit, canceled by the reseller or fails to meet its original description, the secondary platform would be responsible for paying the consumer back for the total amount paid, including any fees.
Making the platforms responsible for the refunds is “a huge win,” says Fix Schaefer, who notes that other consumer protection ticketing laws like the federal Better Online Ticket Sales (BOTS) Act tend to go after individual resellers who are harder to prosecute. Several states around the country are also looking to tackle unfair ticketing practices, including Arizona’s HB2040 (informally known as the “Taylor Swift bill”), which would make it illegal to use bots to purchase unauthorized amounts of tickets or circumvent electronic queues to skip lines ahead of waiting fans. But similar to the federal BOTS Act, the fines for violating these proposed laws would be borne by individuals — not the platforms.
Secondary ticketing platforms, Fix Schaefer adds, are “not going to want to take [the] hit for [resellers]…it’s like having a storefront where they know they’re selling illegal goods but they say, ‘Oh, I just rented that shelf out so somebody.’ No. You’re responsible.”
The Maryland bill would also mandate “all-in” ticket pricing — where consumers see the full price of the ticket, including fees, from the beginning of their transaction — and require those fees to be itemized so fans know where their dollars are going. Nathaniel Marro, managing director of NITO, explains that this portion of the bill will greatly benefit artists. “Artists have no capability of controlling the fees. They don’t make any money off those fees. They are going to the venue and the promoter and the ticketing company,” he says. “The artist wants those fees separated because when fans complain and get upset about how much tickets cost, the only people they are going to point to is the artist.”
Artists will also benefit from fans not spending their entire entertainment budgets on tickets alone. As Marro argues, most fans have a finite level of ancillary income and, if they are spending all or most of it on the ticket, that’s less money spent on music and merch, which goes directly to the performers they came to see.
While other measures, including a cap on resale prices and one that would have compelled secondary sites to identify resellers who are breaking the law, were stricken from the bill as it passed through the state legislature last month, a provision that remained was the commission of a study looking into ticketing practices. If the bill is passed, The Consumer Protection Division of the Office of the Attorney General will conduct a review of how resellers are procuring their tickets, the price difference for fans on the primary versus secondary market, fraudulent tickets, the use of bots, what measures other states have enacted to protect consumers during the ticket buying process and more.
Fix Schaefer predicts that the study, which would be produced by the end of 2024, would succeed in bringing legislatures back to the table on measures like resale caps. “As they are gathering the facts and the data to see what kind of consumer deception and gouging occurs,” she says, “they will be left with a mission to come back and do more.”
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