www.billboard.com: California could become the next state in the U.S. to put a limit on the price of resale concert tickets. Today (Feb. 5), California state assemblyman Matt Haney introduced a spot bill titled the California Fans First Act that would cap the price of a resold concert ticket to no more than 10% above the ticket’s original face value.
4 comments:
I'm really glad this is happening, especially in a state with multiple cities (Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco) that have major concert venues. I remember in my junior year of high school, I tried to buy second-hand tickets to see Boygenius on Halloween (Boogenius, an event I'd miss the original sale for by about an hour). My ticket, three middle-bowl tickets that originally sold for around $ 200 total, was $ 600 for my mom, my friend, and me at the Hollywood Bowl. That is a 200% increase in price for a 90-minute event. An event, which was in the middle of the school/work day, and of course, most likely has a waiting room of thousands of people, many of them bots. I think the next step in this legislation is to ban dynamic pricing, making tickets to see artists 1k+, while the person who bought it five minutes ago got the same ticket for 50-60% less, just because the line was a little shorter.
This bill is really great news, it's definitely showing the industry going in the right direction in terms of regulating the ticket market. For the longest time I was always skeptical about how companies like Ticketmaster were really handling resale properly. It almost seemed like they were deliberately lenient on bots being able to purchase tickets faster than humans, and then those bot tickets could withhold enough of the tickets that there would be only resale tickets to buy. I think that the time of resale has definitely begun to disappear, now that we are in an era of automation, and being able to make a bot that can instantly buy up most of the tickets, then resell them is now basically the norm. I wouldn't be surprised if Ticketmaster or other companies were involved with the whole thing but I digress. It's just great that we are moving towards ensuring that bots and scalpers can no longer make profits off people just wanting to go see some sort of show.
I'm glad to see regulators doing something about the rampant scalping we're seeing in event ticketing. Ticket resale is in theory a good thing because it allows people to recoup some of the expense of concert tickets if they realize after purchasing they cannot actually go. But with the rise of bots purchasing tickets for the express purpose of reselling them at a huge markup it's been increasingly clear that a change needs to be made. While I usually try to be understanding of price changes as a necessary evil, in the case of scalping none of the additional cost goes to the artists or production team. Not to mention that sites like Ticketmaster have no incentive to put an end to it because they get a commission both on the initial sale of the ticket and on the resale. Venues still use Ticketmaster because at the end of the day the scalping doesn't really change the revenue that the venue sees. In the end this leads to what I argue is the precise situation where government intervention makes sense. The industry gains nothing from scalping continuing to exist but largely doesn't lose enough to justify making the sweeping changes to get rid of it. Customers want to pay the fair price of tickets but due to bot purchasing are forced to pay far more than that. The only people who really benefit from the current arrangement are the ticketing companies and scalpers.
This bill is crucial in furthering the discussion and actual policies surrounding economic inequality and the overall attitude towards companies inflating ticket prices. With the revitalization and overall surge in popularity of concerts we’ve seen since the pandemic, ticket prices inflating have also been a major topic of discussion. The issue of accessibility to mainstream artists and resale companies such as Ticketmaster or StubHub continuing to inflate costs simply because people will pay for it, has heavily impacted how we as an audience expect entertainment if there’s a gate guarded by dollars. It’s incredible to see legal action being taken by state governments against the extreme capitalization of ticket prices we’ve come to, especially when our economy is currently suffering to a severity rivaling The Great Depression. It’s my belief that while putting a price tag, even a very heavy one, is sometimes necessary in order to support these artists and the type of shows they put on, it should never feel as inaccessible and bank-breaking to the average customer as it feels now and I’m glad there are centralized initiatives combatting this.
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