As the Senate Commerce Committee turns its attention to live event ticketing, there’s one thing nearly everyone agrees on: the system should work better for fans.
Too often, fans feel confused, frustrated, or shut out entirely. Lawmakers should be careful, however, not to mistake convenient scapegoats for real causes. Blaming ticket resale for all problems in ticketing is a stretch. Significant harm to fans originate at the source in the currently rigged system dominated by a single, vertically integrated company that maintains a powerful grip over event promotion, artist management, venue operations, and ticketing. That concentration of power, coupled with market conduct, is precisely why the Department of Justice and 40 state attorneys general are suing to break up the Live Nation/Ticketmaster monopoly.
When one company controls nearly every step of the live event ecosystem, fans and competitors pay the price. Market dominance enables opaque ticket holdbacks that create artificial scarcity, confusing presales that advantage insiders, and dynamic pricing at the box office without meaningful disclosure. For some events, it has been revealed that nearly half of all seats never reach the public on-sale.
Worse, fans increasingly don’t fully control the tickets they buy. Restrictive digital ticketing can limit whether tickets can be transferred, resold, or even given away. In some cases, tickets have reportedly disappeared from fans’ digital wallets months after purchase when Ticketmaster decides to invalidate them. When tickets exist only in proprietary apps without clear guardrails, control quietly shifts away from the consumer and toward the dominant platform. It is an abuse of fans and market power.
Over two decades, the members of the Ticket Policy Forum (StubHub, SeatGeek, Vivid Seats, TickPick, Gametime, and Events Ticket Center) have helped move ticket buying from risky, unregulated sidewalk transactions into secure, transparent online marketplaces with guarantees, fraud protection, and customer support. Importantly, these companies are not just resale platforms. Several also work to challenge the status quo in primary ticketing by partnering directly with teams, venues, and promoters to offer fans better access, improved technology, and real choice. Unfortunately, meaningful market entry and expansion have been frustrated repeatedly by the industry incumbent that controls roughly 80 percent of ticketing for major concert venues.
For our part, we support stronger fan protections. We support transparency, less deception, and enforcement against fraud and abuse. We support federal actions at the DOJ, Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and in Congress that are underway that will improve the fan experience and the market. We support enforcement of the federal BOTS Act, the bipartisan TICKET Act and the FTC’s new all-in, upfront pricing rules. What we do not support are policies that restrict legitimate resale, eliminate consumer choice, or further entrench monopolistic control under the banner of reform. Case in point is prohibiting a ticketholder from setting their own price if they choose to sell on our marketplaces while the box office continues to dynamically adjust prices up as desired. Because legislation cannot throttle demand, if we don’t give the freedom to ticketholders to set their own price, they will merely turn to less safe alternatives that operate in the shadows and often beyond the reach of law enforcement. In countries like Ireland and Australia, price caps did not lead to affordable tickets, they fueled shadow market scams.
When plans change, resale allows fans to recoup costs, give tickets to friends or family, or donate them. While tickets can resell above face value for popular events, most events don’t sell out and many resell for less, saving millions of fans significant money compared to original prices. According to Ticketmaster executives, only two percent of their concerts sell out. For nearly every other show, fans aren’t forced to buy from the secondary market when you consider Ticketmaster and the box office still have “face value” tickets available even when the show begins.
Policymakers should resist framing ticketing reform as a zero-sum fight between “good” and “bad” players. The real divide in ticketing reform is not between primary and secondary markets. It’s between systems that empower fans and systems that lock them into a single platform with no alternatives.
After many years of studying this issue, core problems in ticketing have been identified by lawmakers, industry, consumer advocates, and regulators and work is currently underway to address them. The DOJ and state attorneys general are taking Live Nation/Ticketmaster to trial in March in a quest to bust up the monopoly from further abusing its market power to unlock greater choice for fans, venues, artists, teams, and competing ticket companies. The FTC is ramping up its enforcement of the BOTS Act and implemented a new federal price transparency rule. Congress passed the TICKET Act to address refund protection, deceptive websites and speculative ticket offers. And President Trump called for this work to get done. Finishing this work will usher in the greatest reform in live event entertainment we have ever seen since tickets first went online.
The TICKET Act, which passed the House 409–15, targets real abuses without favoring dominant players or restricting consumer choice. It will require investment and change across the industry, including from our member companies. We accept that. Hopefully others will too, and that balance is exactly why the TICKET Act deserves to become law.
