Elected officials in Maryland are currently moving a ticket reform bill titled SB0539 through the state legislature, with approval by both the House and Senate pending. The proposed law is a consumer protection bill aimed at the sale and resale of live event tickets endorsed by the Recording Academy, the National Independent Venue Association (NIVA), the National Independent Talent Organization (NITO), Eventbrite and others .
The current iteration of the bill would ban speculative ticketing (the practice of listing tickets on secondary websites before a reseller acquires a ticket), as well as require ticket holders to display the “all in” price for consumers, meaning the full ticket price — including all fees — must be at the price shown to fans first. The bill will cover concerts, theater performances and live sporting events.
Based on the bill's language, resellers would have to provide the zone and seat number for non-general admission events. This will eliminate the common practice of resellers listing an unassigned seat and procuring a ticket — at a lower price — once the consumer has purchased the “unassigned” seat from a secondary location. It would also reduce the ability of resellers to list general tickets on resale sites before the actual event goes on sale.
Audrey Fix Schaefer, says the vice president of the board and director of communications for the National Independent Venue Association (NIVA). Advertising sign that fans regularly search online for concert tickets to shows promoted by IMP — where she also serves as director of communications — and are directed to misleading secondary websites that inflate the price or offer tickets to events that have yet to be released.
“It's a scam,” he says. “It's an unregulated arbitrage tricking fans into thinking they have to overpay because they can't get a ticket through us. They consider it sold out when tickets have not gone on sale.”
Fix Schaefer exemplifies Mitski's upcoming tour, which will make two stops at IMP's Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, Md., later this year. For these shows, $125 tickets were advertised on secondary sites for $12,000 before actually going on sale. “This is obscene,” he says, and “there's not a single show [resellers] do not do that”.
The Maryland bill would also make it illegal for secondary ticketing platforms to provide a marketplace for the sale or resale of tickets that violate the law. If a consumer purchases a ticket that is counterfeit, canceled by the reseller or does not meet its original description, the secondary platform will be responsible for reimbursing the consumer for the total amount paid, including any fees.
Making platforms responsible for refunds is “a huge win,” says Fix Schaefer, who notes that other consumer protection laws, such as the federal Better Online Ticket Sales (BOTS) Act, tend to go after individual resellers who they are more difficult to prosecute. Several states across the country are also trying to crack down on unfair ticketing practices, including Arizona's HB2040 (informally known as the “Taylor Swift bill”), which would make it illegal to use bots to purchase unauthorized amounts of tickets or skip electronic queues for skipping lines in front of waiting fans. However, similar to the federal BOTS Act, fines for violating these proposed laws would fall on individuals — not platforms.
Secondary ticketing platforms, Fix Schaefer adds, “are not going to want to take [the] tap for [resellers]…it's like they have a storefront where they know they're selling illegal products, but they're like, “Oh, I just rented that shelf for somebody.” No. You are responsible.”
The Maryland bill would also mandate “all-in” ticket pricing — where consumers see the full ticket price, including fees, from the start of their transaction — and require those fees to be itemized so fans can they know where their dollars are going. Nathanael Marro, managing director of NITO, explains that this part of the bill will greatly benefit artists. “Artists do not have the ability to control the fees. They do not make money from these fees. They go to the venue and the promoter and the ticketing company,” he says. “The artist wants these fees separated because when fans complain and get upset about how much the tickets cost, the only person they're going to point to is the artist.”
Artists will also benefit from the fact that fans aren't spending their entire entertainment budget on tickets alone. As Marro argues, most fans have a finite level of ancillary income, and if they spend all or most of it on the ticket, that's less money spent on music and merchandise, which goes directly to the artists they came to see.
While other measures, including a cap on resale prices and one that would have forced secondary sites to identify resellers who break the law, were removed from the bill as it passed the state legislature last month, one provision that remained was the commission a study examining ticketing practices. If the bill passes, the Attorney General's Office's Consumer Protection Division will conduct a review of how resellers procure their tickets, the price difference for fans in the primary versus secondary market, fraudulent tickets, the use of bots , what measures other states have put in place to protect consumers during the ticketing process and more.
Fix Schaefer predicts the study, which will be completed by the end of 2024, will succeed in bringing legislatures back to the table for measures such as resale caps. “As they gather the facts and data to see what kind of consumer deception and misrepresentation is going on,” he says, “it will leave them with a mission to go back and do more.”
from our partners at https://www.billboard.com/pro/maryland-ticket-fraud-bill-punish-platforms-illegal-sales/
