Touring

Critics of the secondary ticket business are warning that an epidemic of misleading offers on sites like StubHub and Vivid Seats are eroding consumer confidence in the live event ticket business, and they’re asking for lawmakers to intervene. Longtime music managers like Randy Nichols with the band Underoath say online markets are allowing resellers to list tickets to events that haven’t gone on sale yet — from the 2026 World Cup to David Byrne’s upcoming tour — and reap huge profits from fans who think they are buying legitimate tickets to major sporting events and concerts.
Speculative ticketing exists because of legal loopholes, Nichols says, as well as hundreds of millions of dollars spent on Google advertising and fan naivete. For Byrne’s fall Who is the Sky tour, for example, tickets don’t go on sale until mid-June, but ads for tickets on sites like StubHub and Vivid Seats began popping up seconds after it was announced. On Stubhub, front-row tickets for his Nov. 20 show at L.A.’s Dolby Theater were selling for about $1,100.  

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Often, the seller of these tickets will only procure them after someone has agreed to buy them, and often the seller will wait until a few days or weeks before the show to buy the tickets, knowing the price almost always goes down closer to the show date. StubHub doesn’t disclose that the person listing these tickets doesn’t have them in their possession. 

“There’s even a hashtag scalpers like to use to make this point titled #itpaystowait,” Nichols says. “The longer they wait, the more profit the scalper makes.”  

Now, Nichols and groups like the National Independent Venues Association and the National Independent Talent Organizations are lobbying hard at both the state and federal level to make such practices illegal. While critics have had success in Maryland passing legislation banning speculative ticketing, lawmakers in New York state recently gutted a bill that would have outlawed it there. Officials like NITO executive director Nathaniel Marro are also worried about federal legislation like the TICKET Act, which originally had language banning the practice but has since been altered with a legal loophole that allows for speculative ticketing as part of a concierge service provided by sites like StubHub and Vivid Seats.  

“Think of it like your favorite grocery delivery service — but for incredible experiences,” Vivid Seats explains on its site. “You cart your selections; we’ll handle the shopping.”   

Marro said these sites don’t make clear to fans what they’re buying; many think they’re buying a ticket, not paying someone to buy a ticket that they themselves could get much cheaper if they shopped around on their own.

“That’s the irony — many fans don’t realize that they could buy these tickets themselves,” Nichols tells Billboard. “The fan is tricked because most begin the process of buying tickets on sites like Google, where secondary sites spend hundreds of millions on deceptive ads and websites to trick consumers into thinking they’re buying tickets directly from the box office.”

Nichols says overcharging the customers means less money for fans to spend and notes that it’s often the box offices that have to deal with customer service problems. And while it’s common for the price of a ticket to go down over time, there are exceptions: with Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, sky-high demand made it impossible for some scalpers to fulfill their orders at the price they charged the customer. While some brokers fulfilled the orders at a loss to avoid being penalized by Stubhub, others simply cancelled orders, leaving fans without tickets having spent money on travel and hotels. 

Nichols and Marro worry about the problems speculative ticketing will cause for major sporting events like the 2026 FIFA World Cup, which is taking place across North America next summer. Tickets for the global soccer tournament have not yet gone on sale, but hundreds are listed across Stubhub and Vivid Seats. There’s even a listing for tickets to sit on the pitch during the final championship match on July 19, at MetLife Stadium, for $1.1 million. 

While it’s unlikely someone would pay that much money on StubHub for a World Cup ticket, even to the final championship game, the worry is that brokers will flood the site with speculative listings and cause a shortage of actual tickets, leaving some fans who traveled halfway around the world without their tickets. 

Stephen Parker, executive director of NIVA, says his group has made progress at the state level outlawing the practice, but is worried that federal legislation protecting it as a concierge service could keep it legal for decades. Another concern is that the legislation protecting speculative tickets could quietly be added to Trump’s so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” and passed without any debate. “Lawmakers understand the issue but we’re up against a well-funded lobby,” Parker says. “The concern is that much of the progress we made at the state level will be lost with federal legislation.”