StubHub Inc has been told to make changes to its website and offer refunds to Taylor Swift fans in British Columbia following an investigation by a consumer rights regulator in the Canadian province.
The secondary ticketing company has reached a formal agreement with the regulator to end that investigation, committing to change the way it displays pricing and terms on its website. Refunds will be offered to Swift fans who bought tickets from the resale platform for restricted view seats at her shows at Vancouver’s BC Place Stadium in December 2024.
The agreement comes as primary and secondary ticketing companies respectively try to portray the other as the real problem when it comes to consumer frustration with the way concert ticketing works.
StubHub Inc’s global business, Viagogo, last week used the embarrassing revelations coming out of the Live Nation antitrust trial in New York as justification to once again lay into the UK government’s planned new restrictions on ticket resale.
Under those plans, for-profit resale will be outlawed in the UK. That plan, a Viagogo spokesperson claimed, “is a gift” for Live Nation and its Ticketmaster subsidiary, whose American execs bragged and joked about arbitrarily hiking up parking and VIP fees at the live giant’s amphitheater venues in the US.
It’s the primary ticket sellers that the UK government should be regulating, Viagogo reckons. “By ignoring the primary market”, the spokesperson continued, the UK’s proposed new ticket touting law “will cement the Live Nation and Ticketmaster monopoly, giving it even more power to control and raise prices”.
Live Nation’s recent settlement with the US Department Of Justice, which ended a decent chunk of the ongoing antitrust lawsuit against the company, did include some commitments regarding the operations of the Ticketmaster primary ticketing business.
However, in recent years Live Nation’s American lobbyists have generally talked up the need to better regulate ticket resale - even though Ticketmaster itself is involved in for-profit resale in the US - in a bid to distract politicians in Washington who are proposing new regulation of primary ticketing too.
Meanwhile, secondary ticketing companies like StubHub and Viagogo have long tried to distract regulators and politicians seeking to scrutinise online ticket touting by insisting that they should instead focus on the likes of Ticketmaster.
Of course, both fans and artists would just like a simpler, more transparent ticketing marketplace, with fewer mark-ups and add-on fees, and that requires regulators and politicians to scrutinise both primary and secondary sellers.
And the StubHub developments in British Columbia are a reminder that the ticket resale sites are hardly long-term champions of consumer rights. Indeed, they have long been criticised for deliberately confusing customers, and for using sneaky tactics designed to encourage speedy buying decisions.
And while those sites have made some improvements to their platforms in some countries over the years, that has usually been done reluctantly and after much resistance.
Changes have included making it clearer that people are buying from touts rather than official sellers; making sure a buyer knows how much a tout has marked up the price of a ticket; and clearly communicating where a ticket-buyer will be sitting.
However, in the main, where those changes have been made, it was because of pressure and sometimes litigation from competition and consumer rights regulators.
Consumer Protection BC accused StubHub of violating the province’s Ticket Sales Act by failing to clearly display a ticket’s face value, the add-on fees and commissions, and terms attached to the ticket. Under its agreement with the regulator, StubHub will now address all those issues.
The controversy surrounding the Taylor Swift show in Vancouver was that tickets were sold on the platform for seats with a restricted view, but this information was not provided at the time of purchase. Those concert-goers may be due a refund under the Ticket Sales Act and, where that is the case, StubHub must make contact with affected customers by 1 May.
British Columbia Attorney General Niki Sharma attended one of Swift’s Vancouver concerts, though didn’t have issues with an undisclosed obstructed view. However, she said in a statement last week, “You should get what you paid for. When you don’t know, and you spend a lot of money and show up at a concert and can’t see anything, then that’s clearly a problem”.
The hope is that, following this agreement between Consumer Protection BC and StubHub, ticket-buyers should get all the information they require before buying touted tickets on the resale site in the future. Or at least they will for shows in British Columbia.