As BTS play three shows in Brazil this week, the country’s consumer protection agency - called Senacon - has stepped in to enforce new ticket touting laws that went into force at the start of September.
Citing concerns that the new rules are not being followed as tickets for the BTS shows are being resold online, Senacon has told touting platforms StubHub, Viagogo, TicketSwap, BuyTicket and FunBuyNet to “suspend the facilitation of any new resales of tickets” until they are fully compliant with the law.
The crackdown on ticket touting in Brazil comes as more artists in the UK and US - including Sam Fender and Garth Brooks - comment on the impact ticket touting bots are having on the sale of tickets to their shows through official channels, as touts use special software to hoover up as many tickets as possible from primary ticketing platforms.
The new ticket touting rules in Brazil were part of what became known as the Taylor Swift Law, so called because consumer anger over unregulated ticket touting in the country initially spiked during the sale of tickets to Swift’s ‘Eras Tour’.
Those new rules mainly force ticket touts and the resale platforms they use to be more transparent about the total price of each ticket being sold and the fact they are not official ticket sellers. Similar rules already exist in many other countries.
Whenever new ticket touting regulations are introduced, getting everyone to comply usually requires the intervention of a relevant regulator. Brazil’s Senacon is intervening pretty quickly, using the in-demand BTS shows - what it calls “events with extremely high demand” - as a reason to do so, stating that a failure to intervene risks “collective harm that would be difficult to remedy”.
In a formal notice issued yesterday, Senacon said it was concerned the touting platforms were not complying with the transparency rules, while also failing to provide “an accessible electronic channel for reporting potentially irregular or abusive ticket listings” and “ensuring that such reports are processed and responded to promptly”, which is another requirement of the Taylor Swift Law.
The formal notice then ordered, as “a precautionary measure”, that the “facilitation of any new resales of tickets for events held within the national territory” be suspended until each platform can “demonstrate to this secretariat, by means of technical documentation, that they are in full compliance with the obligations” set out in the new ticket touting laws.
Ticketing touting remains a big talking point in many countries around the world, of course, with artists themselves being increasingly vocal about the problem. And not just about the issue of touts trying to sell tickets to their shows at hiked up prices, but also the impact of touting bots on the sale of tickets through official channels.
Touts often use bots, ie special software - or other sneaky tactics - to buy up large numbers of tickets to in-demand shows, often circumventing restrictions put in place by promoters regarding how many tickets any one person is allowed to buy, and other efforts by artists and their teams to ensure pre-sale tickets are only available to signed-up fans.
Yesterday Sam Fender announced his team had rescheduled the pre-sale of tickets for his summer 2027 shows at St James’ Park in Newcastle because of an “unusually high volume of suspicious activity” on the primary ticketing platform handling the pre-sale, DEAG’s Gigantic.
Fender wrote on social media that he had been told “there’s been a sophisticated bot attack to the Gigantic ticket site which is impacting the St James' Park pre-sale”, meaning “we’re going to have to move the Newcastle pre-sale to 9.30 tomorrow to ensure real fans get the tickets”.
Gigantic added in a statement to Fender’s fans, “We know how frustrating this morning was for many of you, and we’re sorry. Fans should be able to buy tickets fairly and that is what we’re working to make sure happens”.
Last week in the US, Garth Brooks was forced to abandon a plan to include an additional show in Kansas City as part of his current tour after bots swamped AEG’s AXS platform as tickets for the extra date went on sale. The ticketing company said there were 90,000 people in the queue when tickets for the extra show were put on sale, but “most of that number turned out to be bots”.
A statement on the country singer’s website said that an “attempt to get more tickets into fans’ hands went sideways when bots flooded the on-sale for a newly added Saturday matinee”. The problem “became significant enough”, it added, that AXS “shut down the on-sale”.
Earlier this month, Raye also spoke out about the impact of touting bots when tickets went on sale for her show at London’s Royal Albert Hall. She revealed that “hundreds of thousands of fake registrations” were set up by touts who were trying to access tickets to then resell, forcing her team to manually review applications in a bid to ensure tickets were only sold to genuine fans.
In both the UK and the US there are moves to further ramp up ticket touting regulation, with the UK government promising nearly a year ago now to prohibit for-profit touting entirely, although we’re still waiting for that to happen.
Meanwhile, with new AI-powered tools making it easier for touts to try and game the system, primary ticketing platforms are having to put more measures in place to deal with the impact.