Ticketing
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Online ticket resale platform StubHub is considering going public as soon as this summer if it can secure a valuation of more than $16 billion, according to media reports. The Information first reported on Friday (April 12) that StubHub is aiming for a valuation of $16.5 billion, or the valuation it received in 2021 during […]
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.”
A bipartisan coalition of high-profile U.S. senators introduced a sweeping ticketing reform bill today that backers say would significantly improve transparency in concert and sports ticketing, better manage and enforce laws around ticket resale and ban deceptive sales tactics designed to trick consumers into overpaying for access to major events.
The Fans First Act, sponsored by U.S. Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) and co-sponsored by Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), Ben Ray Luján (D-NM), Roger Wicker (R-MS) and Peter Welch (D-VT) is the most comprehensive ticketing industry reform package ever introduced in Congress. It could lead to needed reforms long championed by consumer rights groups, advocacy groups and live music companies including both Live Nation and Ticketmaster, as well as members of the Fix The Tix coalition: the National Independent Venue Association, the Recording Academy, the National Independent Talent Organization, the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists and the Association of Performing Arts Professionals.
“The current ticketing system is riddled with problems and doesn’t serve the needs of fans, teams, artists, or venues,” Sen. Cornyn said in a statement. “This legislation would rebuild trust in the ticketing system by cracking down on bots and others who take advantage of consumers through price gouging and other predatory practices and increase price transparency for ticket purchasers.”
Klobuchar added, “Buying a ticket to see your favorite artist or team is out of reach for too many Americans. Bots, hidden fees, and predatory practices are hurting consumers whether they want to catch a home game, an up-and-coming artist or a major headliner like Taylor Swift or Bad Bunny. From ensuring fans get refunds for canceled shows to banning speculative ticket sales, this bipartisan legislation will improve the ticketing experience.”
The Fans First Act boasts more than a dozen reform proposals aimed at protecting consumers, including requiring sites like StubHub and Ticketmaster to disclose the full price of tickets including fees at the beginning of the sale and detail if tickets are being sold by a primary seller or a reseller.
The bill would also strengthen the Better Online Ticket Sales (BOTS) Act, signed into law in 2016 by President Barack Obama, which prohibits the use of automated bots to purchase tickets online. It would additionally require sellers and resellers to provide proof of purchase to consumers within 24 hours of purchase and refund consumers the full cost of their tickets when events are canceled. If passed, the bill would also commission a Government Accountability Office study to investigate the marketplace and make recommendations.
Among other provisions, the Fans First Act would also ban the sale of a ticket that the reseller claims they possess but don’t acquire until they have already secured a sale for the ticket. Known as speculative ticket sales, the practice is often the subject of complaints from consumers who later learn they significantly overpaid for tickets.
Those who violate the law could face civil penalties and be added to a reporting website for fans to file complaints about illegal ticket sales tactics that would then be investigated by the Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general.
“Fans have become increasingly frustrated with how difficult it has been to obtain affordable tickets to see their favorite artists perform,” said Sen. Blackburn. “Bots are snatching up tickets and selling them for exorbitant prices on secondary markets, while some ticketing companies are selling speculative event tickets that don’t even exist. This bipartisan legislation builds upon my work to safeguard artists and their fans in the online ticket marketplace.”
Sen. Luján stated that the “current ticketing system is limiting access to live entertainment,” adding, “That’s why I’m proud to join my colleagues in introducing the Fans First Act to ensure the sale of tickets is accessible to all consumers.” Sen. Wicker added, “Deceptive ticketing practices have become far too common. This bipartisan effort would result in more transparency and less price gauging.”
The Fan First Act is expected to be heard by the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation. Earlier this week, the U.S. House Subcommittee on Energy and Commerce passed a similar bill called the Speculative Ticketing Oversight and Prohibition (STOP) Act, which is now eligible for a vote by the full House.
The STOP Act also bans speculative ticketing, and like the Fans First Act, addresses a range of deceptive ticketing practices and pricing transparency issues. Live Nation and other groups have also expressed support for the STOP Act.
Earlier today, Live Nation officials issued a statement endorsing the Fans First Act.
“We support the Fans First Act and welcome legislation that brings positive reform to live event ticketing. We believe it’s critical Congress acts to protect fans and artists from predatory resale practices, and have long supported a federal all-in pricing mandate, banning speculative ticketing and deceptive websites, as well as other measures. We look forward to our continued work with policymakers to advocate for even stronger reforms and enforcement,” the statement reads.
Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason jr. also came out with a statement supporting the bill on Friday. “With the introduction of the Fans First Act today, the Recording Academy applauds Senators Klobuchar, Cornyn, Blackburn, Luján, Wicker and Welch for taking this important step towards comprehensive ticketing reform,” he said. “As we work together to improve the ticket marketplace, we urge Congress to act on this bill quickly and continue its effort to protect both artists and fans by increasing transparency and limiting bad actors that take away from the joyous experience of live music.”
Buying concert tickets could become an easier, more straightforward process after the U.S. House Subcommittee on Energy and Commerce passed the Speculative Ticketing Oversight and Prohibition (STOP) Act on Wednesday (Dec. 6). The bill is now eligible for a vote by the full House.
The STOP Act, which Rep. Gus Bilirakus (R-Fla.) called the “biggest ticket reform in years,” does far more than prevent speculative ticketing, though. The bill also addresses a range of deceptive ticketing practices and transparency issues that perplex, aggravate and annoy consumers.
For starters, the bill requires ticket sellers to conspicuously show the final ticket price at the beginning of the purchase process rather than at check-out. “The first price that you see when you order the ticket is the price that you pay — not a penny more,” said Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) during Wednesday’s hearing.
The bill also ensures ticket buyers can get refunds when concerts are cancelled or postponed. Ticket buyers will have the option of receiving a full refund or, subject to availability, a replacement ticket if the event is postponed and rescheduled in the same or a “comparable” location.
“Consumers should not be left on the hook if an event is canceled or postponed and should have the option to receive a full refund or comparable ticket to a rescheduled show or game,” said Rep. Frank Pallone (C-NJ).
The STOP Act also helps consumers know if they’re buying a ticket from the primary seller or a secondary marketplace. The bill would require ticket sellers to provide buyers with a “a clear and conspicuous statement” that the provider is engaged in the secondary sale of the ticket. In addition, the secondary ticket marketplace cannot state that it is “affiliated with or endorsed by a venue, team, or artist” unless a partnership agreement exists.
Deceptive websites that could mislead ticket buyers are also banned. Ticket providers are prevented from using a domain name or subdomain that contains the name of a specific team, league, venue, performance or artist — including “substantially similar” and misspelled names — unless authorized by the owner of the name. Ticket sellers must also make their refund policies known up front.
Finally, as the name of the bill implies, the STOP Act bans speculative ticketing, in effect barringprimary and secondary ticketing marketplaces from selling tickets they do not possess.
For its part, Live Nation, owner of the country’s largest ticketing company, Ticketmaster, welcomes the new measures. “We’ve long supported a federal all-in pricing mandate, along with other measures including banning speculative ticketing and deceptive websites that trick fans,” the company said in a statement. “We’ll continue working with policymakers, advocating for even stronger reforms and enforcement to stop predatory practices that hurt fans and artists.”
Even if the STOP Act passes in the full House, the U.S. Senate must pass a version of the bill for it to become law. Two similar bills have already been introduced in the Senate. Like the STOP Act, the TICKET Act, introduced by Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), would prevent hidden ticket fees, require upfront pricing and stop speculative ticket selling. The Unlocking Ticketing Markets Act, introduced by Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), would limit exclusive, multi-year ticketing contracts in live entertainment.
Each year dozens of primary ticketing systems hit the market, and rarely do any last long enough to generate significant attention or revenue to survive. Lyte is the likely exception.
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That’s because founder and CEO Ant Taylor has a proven track record of innovating the ticketing space, starting with its Lyte ticket exchange allowing fans to sell tickets to one another, directly driving the price of tickets down on the secondary market. In his new bid, Taylor is launching the Lyte Returnable Ticket, which allows buyers to return their tickets for a refund, funded by Lyte, along with tools for fair market pricing and simplified ticket buying tools integrated into the platform.
“Event creators equipped with data intelligence and pricing solutions don’t just increase their revenue potential—they also pave the way for more fans to have richer, more transparent ticketing experiences,” says Taylor. “With the Lyte Returnable Ticket, we’re putting fans first by providing a world-class experience, and generating more demand for creators.”
Lyte is the first platform to upend the industry standard policy of no refunds and no cancellations for ticket purchases. Fans gain early access, dedicated support lines, and exclusive tickets unavailable to other ticket holders.
Lyte’s current ticketing partners includes Australia’s music and arts festival Lost Paradise, Madrid’s MadCool Festival, the Association for Volleyball Professionals Pro Tour, and event powerhouse ReedPop, owner of PAX and numerous Comic Con events.
Lyte’s demand-first ticketing platform is powered by SmartPricing and SmartFulfillment, a powerful ecommerce engine with a history of outpricing scalpers and giving event creators total control of the sales experience for fans. Lyte’s SmartPricing feature dynamically prices tickets at fair market rates.
SmartFulfillment introduces an intelligence to who gets tickets by empowering event creators to decide which fans are fulfilled first. Fulfillment logic can prioritize group orders, repeat buyers, local fans and more, giving true priority treatment to event creators’ best customers beyond stressful, finite early access windows. Lyte’s platform also includes a Subscribe and Request buying interface, enabling fans to request tickets months in advance to avoid painful on-sales. The new experience helps creators sell out earlier, with 95.7% of requested tickets converting to tickets sold.
Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) is planning to roll out new legislation to beef up the BOTS ACT and combat the growing use of automated software to attack high-demand online ticket sales for major concert tours.
In November 2022, unknown individuals attacked Taylor Swift’s ticket sale for her Eras tour, using automated software to overwhelm the Ticketmaster platform and prevent some fans from accessing tickets.
The BOTS ACT, co-authored by Blackburn at the end of 2016 and signed into law by then-president Barack Obama, outlawed the use of bots to attack ticket sales and jump the line to buy tickets ahead of consumers, but the law has only been enforced once in the seven years it’s been on the books. Blackburn is hoping to change that with the adoption of the Mitigating Automated Internet Networks for (MAIN) Event Ticketing Act, a bill she co-authored with Sen. Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.) that would create new reporting requirements for online ticket sellers attacked by Bots and enact new security requirements for sites like Ticketmaster.
“A fan should be able to buy tickets to live events without bots stealing them and hiking the price,” said Sen. Blackburn in a press release provided to Billboard.
Under the BOTS Act, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has exclusive power to file suit against bot users and work with FBI and DOJ officials to bring criminal charges. Individuals caught intentionally breaking the law can face civil fines of $10,000 per violation.
“We have given the FTC the tools they need to help reduce ticket costs and protect consumers and artists from scammers,” Blackburn adds. “Now we must ensure they are enforcing it. This bipartisan legislation builds upon my work to safeguard artists and their fans in the online ticket marketplace.”
The new legislation would create a new forum for online ticket sellers have to report successful bot attacks to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and create a complaint database so consumers can also share their experiences with the FTC, and various state attorneys general. The bill also includes evolving data security requirements for online ticket sellers and requires the sharing of information between the FTC and law enforcement; as well as an annual report from the FTC to Congress on BOTS enforcement.
“Live entertainment is one of America’s greatest pastimes, and all Americans should be able to enjoy it without the fear of being scammed,” said Senator Luján. “I’m proud to join Senator Blackburn in introducing legislation to expand the BOTS Act. This bill will allow the FTC to enforce safeguards and set requirements to protect consumers from online ticketing schemes.”
Officials from Live Nation-owned Ticketmaster told Billboard they supported the legislation, saying in a statement: “We commend Senators Blackburn and Lujan for introducing this update to the BOTS Act. Ticketmaster leads the industry in fighting bots, and we see first-hand that scalper bot armies are only getting larger and more sophisticated. Scalpers make billions each year, and until there are real consequences, they will continue to rob fans of tickets at the onsale which is why we’ve long supported much stronger enforcement.”
The bill has also received the support of the National Independent Venue Association which issued a statement applauding Blackburn and Luján for “introducing the MAIN Event Ticketing Act to further crackdown on ticket-buying bots that rob fans of the opportunity to see their favorite artists. The Act builds on the BOTS Act of 2016, which put in place foundational guidelines to prevent ticket resellers from engaging in predatory ticketing practices. We believe in restoring trust in the ticketing experience for fans, and we stand ready to work with Senators Blackburn and Luján to ensure this legislation advances as part of critical comprehensive ticketing reform.”
Olivia Rodrigo is proving that artists don’t need expensive technology or a sprawling staff to make sure their lowest-priced tickets end up in the hands of fans — and not scalpers.
Ticket brokers were crawling around Rodrigo’s website on Wednesday (Sept. 13), assessing their odds of scoring tickets for the superstar’s freshly announced Guts World Tour, which kicks off in February at Acrisure Arena in Palm Springs, Calif. An early spring tour headlined by Rodrigo is a pretty good bet for ticket resellers based on the singer’s continued chart success: “Vampire,” the first single from her new album, Guts, is currently enjoying its 10th week on the Hot 100, while the set’s second single, “Bad Idea Right?”, debuted in the top 10 last month. Meanwhile, the album itself earned more than 126 million on-demand streams in its first four days of release. More importantly, her 2022 Sour trek was an underplay first run tour — Rodrigo had kept her ticket prices reasonable, averaging about $75 a ticket — that saw demand far exceed supply and drove prices into the stratosphere.
For Guts, Rodrigo is taking a simple, innovative step to protect what she is calling “Silver Star tickets,” a two-seat package she’s selling for $40 a pop to individuals her team can verify as fans.
Needless to say, scalpers will want to get in on that. A $20 ticket to a high-demand concert can generate a big markup and quick profits, especially compared to tickets priced between $50 to $200 — the price range for the Live Nation-booked tour. Tickets in the $50 to $200 range, meanwhile, will leave some room for markup on resale sites but make profitability less certain, especially on top-tier tickets.
To pull this off, like a game of cat and mouse, Rodrigo’s team must keep the Silver Star tickets out of scalper’s hands for the program to be a success. Few details about how this will work have been made public, but Rodrigo’s registration site hints that the singer’s team will directly select fans to participate. The real innovation, however, is a requirement that fans pick up their $20 tickets at will call on the night of the show; only then will they learn where their seats are located.
That’s not too different from how box offices used to use will call-only pick up to fight scalping, but where that strategy would typically aim to protect the most expensive tickets this time it’s being used on the cheapest. The limited number of tickets involved here will also help keep from overwhelming staff, whereas previously such a strategies became an unmanageable burden. Meanwhile, not knowing the section or row of a ticket makes it very difficult to sell it on secondary sales websites like StubHub, which requires scalpers to list tickets in the general vicinity of where they are located.
The plan isn’t fool-proof — when it comes to resellers, nothing is — but it places enough hurdles in front of scalpers that most will hopefully be deterred from taking advantage of a program that’s meant to get discount tickets into the hands of fans who otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford to see Rodrigo in concert. And if the strategy is successful, it’s easy to see it being duplicated by other artists, whose biggest frustration with ticketing tends not to be that their best seats are landing on the secondary market, but that seats affordable to their younger and less economically advantaged fans are ending up there too.
Ticketing company Dice raised $65 million from MUSIC, the holding company founded by music veteran Matt Pincus and LionTree, the company announced Wednesday (Aug. 23). Pincus, MUSIC’s CEO and a co-founder of SONGS Music Publishing, which was acquired by Kobalt in 2017, will join Dice’s board of directors.
Additional investors in the funding round include Structural Capital; Ahdritz Holding LLC, an investment vehicle for Kobalt Music founder Willard Ahdritz; Exor Ventures, a venture fund listed on the Euronext Amsterdam with a net asset value of €28.2 billion ($30.6 billion); and Mirabaud Lifestyle Fund, an investment fund of Mirabaud Asset Management that focuses on companies that address the needs of Millennials and Generation Z consumers.
While Dice is a relatively small player in a field filled with large competitors, Pincus considers Dice to be “a completely different business” than big platforms such as Live Nation’s Ticketmaster and AEG’s AXS. “Dice is a platform for fans,” he tells Billboard. Rather than create a standard ticketing platform, Dice built a platform used by those young consumers that attend concerts most frequently. “It’s a user-centric platform” people use to find shows, discover culture and lifestyle events in a new city and and compare activities with friends, says Pincus. “They made ticket-buying fun — which is really hard to do.”
“We’re investing heavily in building even more technology and this year alone we released over 60 new features for fans, venues and artists,” Phil Hutcheon, CEO and founder of Dice, said in a statement. “I’m excited that Matt (Pincus) has joined the board and we’re more focused than ever on our mission to get fans out more.”
The funding will help Dice launch in new cities and further its expansion in Europe and United States and support ongoing investment in product development. The London-based company believes it will serve more than 55,000 artists and over 10,000 venues, festivals and promoters this year across 30 cities in the United Kingdom, United States, France, Germany, India, Italy and Spain.
Ahdritz’s relationship with Hutcheon goes back to 2015. “Having started AWAL at that time, I needed so many more venues for all my acts to play,” Ahdritz said in a statement. “DICE delivers a transformative experience for all stakeholders – from fans to venues to artists and looked like the future for live music. DICE has come a long way on their vision, and today it’s even clearer that the live industry needs changing. I am excited to have the opportunity to be part of the company as an investor.”
“Structural Capital is very excited to be involved in helping DICE continue its success and future growth,” Kai Tse, Structural Capital co-founder and managing partner, said in a statement. “We believe DICE is a true industry innovator.”
Dice also announced the appointment of Ali Byrd as chief financial officer. Byrd was previously with healthcare technology company Olive and has held senior positions at Microsoft, Limewire and CoverWallet.
A whole generation of live music fans is being trained to expect the worst when it comes to purchasing tickets for concerts, according to National Independent Venue Association (NIVA) president Dayna Frank.
“It’s imperative to the future of live music, especially for the emerging class and the emerging artists, to be able to make buying a ticket and going to a show at even club level venues easy and simple,” Frank said at the NIVA ’23 conference in Washington, D.C. “It’s devastating what we’ve trained young people to expect when they go buy a ticket: how hard it is, you’ve got to be online at a certain time, you might not get it, you might pay $85 when there are $25 tickets available.”
Frank was speaking on the panel “Fix The Tix: How We Stop Predatory Ticketing Practices from Harming Fans and Artists,” which was held at The Anthem on July 10. Appearing alongside her was Lyte CEO Ant Taylor, who agreed with Frank’s assessment of the bleak ticket-buying process for music fans in 2023.
“The thing that we forget about or that we frequently don’t talk about is that on the other side of all this bulls— is the fan,” said Taylor. “How many fans aren’t even coming to an onsale anymore because they’ve given up because of all the points of friction?”
Since concerts restarted following COVID-19 lockdowns, obtaining tickets for high-profile artists like Taylor Swift and Beyoncé has become a game of uncertainty and chance due to factors including bots, unscrupulous brokers and high demand from fans who have waited years to see their favorite artists. And while neither of those superstars will have their livelihoods affected by ticketing issues, smaller artists, venues and promoters in the live music ecosystem can be severely impacted, particularly by brokers who scoop up tickets and place them on the secondary market at markedly higher prices. Because fewer fans are willing to buy tickets at those higher prices, post-pandemic “no-show” rates — or the percentage of people who buy tickets but don’t attend a show — have remained frustratingly high.
“I don’t know how many folks are tracking how many of their tickets are on the secondary markets the day of the show, but we’ll easily see 20-30 tickets just sitting there, unsold,” said Frank, who also owns famed independent venue First Avenue in Minneapolis.
Frank stated that a common no-show rate was around 7% prior to the pandemic. Now, even though no-shows have gone down from their pandemic high, independent venues are continuing to see rates of 12-15% regularly. That means fewer bar and merch sales, which can often be the revenue that makes or breaks a show for small artists and venues.
The current state of concert ticketing in the United States was a major concern for attendees of the second annual conference that hosted independent venues, promoters, agents and ticketers from July 9-12 in the nation’s capital. The “Fix the Tix” panel focused on issues facing the ticketing industry and possible solutions – many of which can be found in the Fix the Tix Act NIVA is lobbying for the federal government to pass. The legislation would ban the sale of speculative tickets (tickets that brokers don’t have in their possession) and the use of bots, as well as require up front pricing and caps on resale prices while providing funds for enforcement.
“The Fix the Tix proposal says that promoters and artists should be able to put terms and conditions on the tickets as they transfer hands,” said Frank, who added that brokers have been lobbying the federal government to make non-transferable tickets illegal for well over a decade. The brokers’ argument, according to Frank, is that they own a ticket and have the right to do anything they want with it — but live music professionals believe the ticket is actually a license, she says.
“That ticket can change hands 25 times, but ultimately the product is the show that we’re responsible for,” Frank continued. “As the people responsible for the product, we should be able to have terms and conditions on this license…Our product involves people coming into our houses which we are legally responsible for. We have to have oversight of how those tickets are transferred.”
Fellow panelist Frank Riley of High Road Touring agreed. “The only way to put this genie back in the bottle is to regain control of who’s in charge of the ticket, and that’s been the artist and the promoter,” said Riley. “Any other solution that’s out there will not work.”
Riley said that putting a cap on how much a ticket can be resold for would be a major hit to brokers on the secondary market. “If you eliminate the profit motive out of the secondary market [as we know it], it will disappear,” he said.
As NIVA, the National Independent Talent Organization, Universal Music Group and many other music industry entities who have signed on to the Fix the Tix legislation are fighting for federal regulation over ticketing, University of Chicago Booth School of Business professor of economics and entrepreneurship Eric Budish suggested that transparency about where the funds go could bolster those efforts.
“Congress or somebody else should figure out who made how much money on the Taylor Swift tour. Taylor Swift made a lot of money and good for her,” Budish said. “But if a ticket got resold for $2,000, there’s 35% fees on that, give or take, so the resale platform probably made more on that ticket than Taylor Swift did. The broker made more money on that ticket than Taylor Swift did. The search engines made a bunch of money in aggregate on those tickets. I’d love to see that money added up. I think that could be really persuasive to a large number of consumers.”
Another approach to tackling the issue came from panelist Neeta Ragoowansi, executive director of Folk Alliance International and president of Music Managers Forum in the United States. Ragoowansi explained that selling fake tickets or listing tickets that a seller does not actually own constitutes copyright infringement, since the seller is using the name of an artist and/or venue to sell an item without permission. She suggested taking legal action against brokers or search engines who are allowing them to operate these illegal practices, similar to how the National Music Publishers’ Association filed suit against Twitter for copyright infringement over its failure to license music.
Naming NIVA, NITO, Music Managers Forum and the Recording Academy, Ragoowansi said, “There’s a variety of interested parties that have members who have standing to file suit there. File suit on mass, class action or even just 15-20 parties who have a variety of causes of action.”
A class action against the brokers or search engines could make substantial headlines, says Ragoowansi, adding it would “allow for the parties to come to the table and start talking about settlement and creating a precedent so that others don’t come in.”
Ticketmaster owner Live Nation’s push for legislative ticketing reform earlier this year has actually slowed down progress on those issues, sources tell Billboard, stalling a long-in-the-works bill that addresses nearly identical concerns about the ticketing business.
Last year, even before Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour presale fiasco inspired a flurry of ticketing reform bills, the National Independent Venue Association (NIVA) had been working on a wide-reaching piece of legislation in cooperation with Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and John Cornyn (R-Texas) to “combat predatory and deceptive ticketing practices,” according to sources close to the issue. The bill included bans on deceptive practices and speculative listings, enforcement of existing anti-bot laws and new tools for countering ticketing fraud. Its most substantive change took aim at the secondary ticketing industry, granting artists and tour promoters sweeping power to reduce ticket scalping by allowing artists to set legally binding rules on how and where their tickets are resold, according to a November 2022 memo reviewed by Billboard. Besides NIVA, Universal Music Group, Wasserman Music, Dice and See Tickets were all among the broad coalition of music companies supporting the effort under the coalition name Fix the Tix.
But, for months, the bill has languished — even as attention around ticketing has grown considerably following a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in January on competition within the ticketing industry. That’s because of increased lobbying by pro-scalper groups and a decision in February, by Ticketmaster owner Live Nation, to unveil the FAIR Ticketing Act, a five-point proposal with a list of legislative fixes — and the recommendations were very similar to the fixes NIVA had been quietly lobbying for.
With NIVA representing thousands of independent venues and Live Nation representing its huge corporate portfolio, the two entities often have opposing agendas, and some NIVA members theorized that Live Nation was attempting to sabotage their bill. Worried that supporting a similar proposal would look like politicians were rewarding Ticketmaster at a time when outrage at the company was growing, momentum around the NIVA bill waned. Klobuchar’s office, which had planned to announce a bi-partisan bill with Cornyn in the spring, delayed its announcement amid new concerns that the bill might strengthen Ticketmaster, sources close to both Live Nation and NIVA tell Billboard. They add that the FAIR Ticketing Act was neither a clone of the proposed NIVA bill nor a poison pill.
“Live Nation and Ticketmaster have been the target of the Senate since the two companies merged in 2010,” says one NIVA member speaking on the condition of anonymity. “There’s an appetite in D.C. to punish Ticketmaster, but the reality is that there’s no way to pass a law that would both punish Ticketmaster and bring about the types of reforms needed to clean up the ticketing business.”
Case in point: On April 28, Klobuchar’s office introduced legislation with Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) that would have banned ticketing companies like Ticketmaster from signing venue clients to long-term exclusive contracts. The proposal has faced opposition from some members of NIVA, who argued it would hurt small venues that relied on the payments from those contracts, and that fans would likely have to make up for the loss through higher ticket prices. A representative for Live Nation previously told Billboard the proposal wouldn’t “have a material impact on our business as we historically add clients in competitive marketplaces.”
As for similarities between the NIVA-backed bill and Live Nation’s proposal, “It’s not surprising that the two groups that spent the last six months thinking about legislative fixes [to] the same issue came up with similar solutions,” said one source close to Live Nation, noting that much of the friction between NIVA and Ticketmaster has subsided.
Ticketmaster officials appear to have gotten the message and have toned down the rhetoric around their political efforts. Many of the campaign efforts have been picked up by NIVA, which successfully lobbied for $15 billion in federal aid for venues negatively impacted by the coronavirus pandemic in 2021. Now, sources say, the Fix the Tix bill is expected to be proposed in the next couple of weeks.
Leading the charge at NIVA is the organization’s executive director, Stephen Parker. A longtime D.C. insider who worked with Sen. Tim Kaine when he was the governor of Virginia, Parker spent a decade at the bipartisan National Governors Association and has served on the board of the Country Music Association.
Parker confirmed to Billboard that neither Live Nation nor Ticketmaster has signed on as official supporters of the Fix the Tix coalition, while he and others are being extra cautious not to make their legislative package a referendum on Ticketmaster. Still, the Live Nation-owned company will play an outsized role in the Fix the Tix plan, as opponents are getting ready to paint the proposal as a major power shift to Ticketmaster and away from scalpers.
The Fix the Tix proposal would “make it illegal for resellers, professional ticket brokers, and ticket platforms to violate the artists’ and venues’ ticket terms and conditions, including restrictions that prohibit price gouging of fans through the resale of tickets above face value,” according to an early draft obtained by Billboard. That means artists, venues, or promoters could place ceilings on how much tickets are allowed to be marked up or restrict ticket resale until after all primary tickets have been sold. Since Ticketmaster and AEG are the only two companies on the market with technology that can track tickets after they’re sold to see if they are being resold and for how much, however, critics say this sort of law would create an even greater dependence on their services.
That’s far more power than Ticketmaster should have, says John Breyault, vp of public policy at the National Consumers League and a founding board member of the Fan Freedom Project, an advocacy group fighting restrictions on resale that receives funding from StubHub and Vivid Seats. “Ticketmaster does not want to eliminate resale; they want to control resale,” Breyault says. The current proposals by Ticketmaster and NIVA could bankrupt major secondary resale sites, especially if most tours decided to make their tickets non-transferable. Once Live Nation “got rid of its competitors,” Breyault says the company could convince the artist it works with to lighten up on ticket transferability and effectively “own the resale market.”
To a degree, Fix the Tix is a response to the dozens of pieces of pro-scalping legislation and lobbying that have been proposed at the state and federal levels over the past six months. This Fix the Tix bill would seek to overrule any state-level legislation that exists; there are currently over a dozen states with laws that outlaw restrictions on ticket transferability, meaning anyone can resell tickets at any price they want.Others, like Rep. Bill Pascrell’s (D-NJ) BOSS and SWIFT Act — which Breyault supports and the Fix the Tix coalition opposes — would permanently legalize scalping by making it illegal for ticketing companies to restrict ticket transferability.
Last year, the American Economic Liberties Project, which is funded by Pierre Omidyar — former chairman of eBay and owner of Ticketmaster rival StubHub — announced the “Break Up Ticketmaster,” campaign, aimed at pressuring the DOJ “to investigate and unwind the 2010 Live Nation-Ticketmaster merger,” according to the group’s website.
Opponents of scalping say the BOSS Act would make it impossible for artists to keep their tickets off secondary sites and would allow all scalping sites to sell any tickets they wanted without restriction. Proponents, however, believe that outcome is better for fans than allowing Live Nation and the artists it works with to make these decisions.
While the scalpers and the concert promoters are far apart on most issues, the rival bills do share consensus on a number of practices in ticketing that have long drawn the ire of fans. Those include speculative ticket listing, drip pricing and misleading marketing campaigns — all of which would be banned by both NIVA’s proposal and the BOSS and Swift Act.
Editor’s note: Billboard has updated this story to more accurately describe the work performed by the American Economic Liberties Project.