Kid Rock may be a prominent Donald Trump fan, but when it comes to ticket touting he’s happy to swerve away from not one but two of Trump’s key political beliefs: that regulation is bad and European governments are stupid.
Because, when it comes to secondary ticketing, Kid Rock wants American lawmakers to implement European style regulation, mainly by introducing a price cap on the resale of tickets.
“In parts of Europe, resale ticket prices are capped”, the musician told senators in US Congress yesterday, adding, “it seems to be working”. Confirming his support for a 10% price cap within the US, so that touts - or scalpers - could only resell tickets at a price 10% higher than face value, he insisted “resale ticket price caps work and protect real fans”.
Ticket touting rules vary greatly around Europe, but in some countries the resale of tickets is indeed regulated, with either price caps, or rules that outright ban for-profit and/or unapproved touting.
Kid Rock was speaking before the Senate Commerce Committee yesterday at a session putting the spotlight on all things ticketing. Needless to say, the role and dominance of Live Nation and its Ticketmaster business, in both primary and secondary ticketing, was a big part of that conversation. And Live Nation’s EVP of Corporate And Regulatory Affairs, Dan Wall, also spoke.
Ticketmaster remained much more involved in secondary ticketing in the US market even after it shut down its standalone ticket resale sites in Europe back in 2018. However, despite that fact, Live Nation has still supported the introduction of more ticket touting regulation in the US in more recent years, even advocating for a resale price cap since 2024.
Wall reiterated that support for more resale regulation yesterday. He told senators that the ticket resale market “cries out for reform”, and “we need clear, legally enforceable rules that put the content creators - artists, teams, etc - in charge of what happens to the tickets to their events”. And those rules should be US-wide, he added, to end the current system where what the law says differs from state to state.
The Live Nation EVP also ran senators through the various ways that the live giant has tried to crackdown on bad conduct in the resale market, in particular by battling the bots touts use to buy up tickets to in-demand shows. And, unsurprisingly, Wall pushed back strongly against the lawsuit filed by the Federal Trade Commission last year that claims Live Nation has, in fact, colluded with the touts.
But none of that stopped the live giant and its ticketing subsidiary from getting quite a bit of criticism during the Senate session, from both senators and industry representatives, and from Mr Kid Rock.
Although he acknowledged that Live Nation does now support a ticket resale price cap, the musician added, “Where I’m confused is, I don’t think Ticketmaster needs a law passed to do this?” Which is true. While UK lawmakers are only now planning on introducing a new law prohibiting for-profit resale, on Ticketmaster’s UK platform tickets can already only be resold at face value plus admin fee.
The fact that Live Nation supports a price cap in the US but hasn’t voluntarily put one in place on its own platform, Kid Rock added, “proves these companies have been reactive, not proactive”. Therefore Congress should introduce a new price-cap rule to which Live Nation can react.