A new law has been proposed in California that would put a cap on the price of touted tickets, so that ticket touts or scalpers operating within the state could only resell tickets for 10% more than they paid for them in the first place. The proposals come as the Fix The Tix campaign calls on New York state legislators to outright ban for-profit ticket touting and to restrict admin fees charged on face value resale.
In the US, most regulation of ticketing happens at a state-level, meaning rules differ around the country. In some states ticket resale is regulated and/or restricted, while in others the law actually protects the rights of touts to resell tickets and prevents promoters from putting their own restrictions in place.
The new proposals in California have been introduced by Assembly member Matt Haney via what he calls the Fans First Act.
He explains, “concert tickets aren’t stocks to be flipped for profit - they’re a chance for real fans to see the artists they love - yet for years we’ve let out-of-state scalpers and speculators cut the line, buy up tickets in bulk, and resell them at outrageous mark-ups - shutting out fans while taking the lion’s share of the money”.
These scalpers, he adds, “didn’t write the songs; they didn’t build the venues; they didn’t clean the bathrooms; they didn’t put on the show - but they’re the ones cashing in”. That’s simply “not fair”, Haney goes on, and more importantly, “it’s not inevitable”.
A statement explaining in more detail what the Fans First Act sets out to achieve says the proposed new law would “allow for reasonable fan-to-fan resale by permitting a modest price increase, while stopping large-scale profiteering - if a person cannot make an event or changes their plans, they can still resell their ticket to another fan with a modest regulated price increase of no more than 10%”.
The statement also notes that similar laws have been proposed or introduced in other countries. It specifically references the UK, where the government has committed to introduce a new law basically banning for-profit ticket touting, with a to-be-determined cap on admin fees that can be charged when tickets are resold at face value.
On the other side of the US, the Fix The Tix campaign is calling on New York lawmakers to introduce a very similar law there, as they review the state’s current ticketing regulations. The current rules are due to expire in July this year, a move designed to force a regular review of what the law says about ticketing.
Fix The Tix, spearheaded by the US National Independent Venue Association, wants to ensure existing rules relating to transparency and all-in-pricing on ticketing platforms remain, but also wants legislators to use the review to ramp up the regulation of ticket resale.
NIVA Executive Director Stephen Parker says that “we must act boldly to fix the many provisions in New York law written by predatory resellers and multi-billion dollar platforms”. And that, among other things, means “we must ban selling tickets above face value” and “cap resale”.
As part of Fix The Tix’s ‘principles to fix ticketing’, the campaign says New York state should “prohibit resale of tickets above their original total cost and cap all resale fees at no more than 5% of the original ticket price”.
The trade group also warns politicians that rival proposals from various organisations that ultimately represent ticket touts - as well as those coming from Live Nation’s Ticketmaster - “are not centred on fans and artists - but on preserving the billions they make by deceiving and price gouging fans through their resale platforms and the multi-billion dollar resale platforms that pay them to advocate for more profits”.