Defend the indefensible: Ticket touting

yes - back in Sept i bought 4 White Stripes tickets for $40 apiece, for the Austin TX show at Stubb's Bar-B-Q about 3000 capacity, the show sold out in less than 5 minutes. and i sold each ticket on eBay (within the next 48 hours) for $120 apiece. then the show was cancelled and i got my initial $40 investment back on each ticket, and didn't give refunds to the buyers cause that was my policy as stated in the auctions. i felt like a bastard but hey, i made almost $500 on the ordeal (after getting my intial investment back) and that'll fund my concert-going and CD buying for about 6 months i figure. it's not a regular practice though, that's the only tickets i've resold all year, i just knew it'd sell out instantly so i jumped on it that one time. and yeah, i felt like an asshole but it's all about supply and demand - i didn't force the buyers to pay that much, it was their choice and if they'd rather have a White Stripes ticket than $120 then so be it, we can both be satisfied!

fyi i'm a full-time college student dealing with paying for college tuition, daily living expenses and monthly child support - so anything i can do to obtain extra money for music/concerts for less cost is a plus.

yes. i would totally offer refunds in that circumstance, though.

i have both bought and sold tickets on ebay and have been happy from either side - buying i got to go to great gigs that i wouldn't have been able to otherwise, because they sold out before i knew about them (NIN at the astoria, mountain goats at the old blue last). selling i got to see bloc party for free (bought 4 tix, sold 2 for twice what i paid for them). on the other hand i found that it wasn't always all that easy (e.g. when bands announce extra shows etc), and you can definitely get burned doing this.

but yeah, overall, i don't really have a problem with people selling tickets for twice face value on ebay, and i would buy/sell like that again (in fact, for the mountain goats i paid nearly 35 quid for 8 quid face value - but i was happy to pay this, and grateful to the ebay seller!).

broke college student paying child support, but casually showing off the fact that he spends $1000 a year on CDs and concerts, doesn't exactly win me over to this whole business model.

No kidding.

"I kicked this guy walking passed me directly in the nuts for no reason but my water heater broke last week so it's okay"

if said guy asks to be kicked in the nuts, what's the problem? like i said, i didn't force anyone to buy my tickets; i took advantage of fair market value based on what people were willing to pay.

and Doctor Casino: au contrairé, i wouldn't spend $1000 a year on music if i wasn't coming across spending money for that purpose - i.e., occasionally selling on eBay. i take care of my responsibilities first, and buy music second; there's no question i'd pay tuition or family bills before seeing a concert (and definitely have before), but i'm not the "broke college student" you say i am. i have an excellent job that pays over $30k a year (while still in school) and i can afford to spend about 3% of my income on music, at my own discretion. so kindly fuck off, thanks in advance.

Wow, that's stupid.

back to the topic at hand, then?

i felt like a bastard but hey, i made almost $500 on the ordeal

Awesome.

I'm glad you don't get to see your kids.

actually i do, thanks for asking. to quote Alex in NYC, fuck yourself, you fatuous slab of dung.

and she's my kid. singular. not plural.

http://www.mirror.co.uk/showbiz/2007/11/16/sex-pistols-junk-rock-89520-20115335/

wow

LOL at the moral superiority upthread. The big idiots are the ones paying $120 to see the White Strips. Actually the ones paying $40 should maybe see a doctor too.

So if a number of people working for a ticket resale company buy up all the tickets to scalp them (rather than leaving them onsale for the 'fans') do people think that's ok? And yea I know it would be hard to come up with a system that limited ticket purchases to people who were gonna actually go to the show.

how about only sell tickets at the door? lol

How about they charge $120 for advance tickets? ie. What they are apparently worth.

au contrairé

on a side note: so it's obvious a few of you have a problem with reselling tickets, which is fair enough. where do you draw the line on that? i mean, what about cds? for example -- the other week i was used cd shopping and i came across a copy of Linkin Park's first EP, which judging by completed auctions ought to sell for about $100 to $150, possibly more. now needless to say, i picked it up and i'll use the money myself to buy music i find interesting.

do any of you resell rare cds/vinyl that you find whilst shopping? and if so, what's the difference between reselling recorded music and tickets to live shows? or say, autographed items? just a thought.

i've got mixed feelings about this in general. i can understand stephen's points -- especially his motivations/budgeting regard music and other responsibilities/etc. (and hey, we shouldn't really be on his back, moralizing about personal shit of his that we really don't have a fucking clue about anyways), and also the point that says "well, the buyer is the one who decides that $120 (or whatever amount) is worth it for the experience of going." i don't really go to live shows, and when i have in the past, i've never paid anything more than $20 or so for a ticket (radiohead a few years back excluded), so i know i'll never be the one desperate enough to drop a few hundred bucks on ticket prices. so it might be harder for me to judge in this case. there's nothing about a $120 ticket that i'd be interested in.

but is it any different than charging $100 or more for an out-of-print album? selling stuff on ebay for hundreds of bucks? i say not at all.

i've been searching for months for affordable copies of wolfgang voigt's GAS albums, and instead see dudes selling them for ridiculous, over-the-top prices. zauberberg was $100 last time i checked. now i'm looking for sun city girls' torch of the mystics, the cheapest copy i see is $225. there's noooo way i'll ever pay this much money for an album, and even if i did i know it'd be my choice to do it. but it still rubs me the wrong way that they're charging that much. help another music fan out, you know? though i can't say that i wouldn't do the same...the money is very hard to pass up, and as said, if there's a demand... it's a tough issue. i guess it just pisses me off wrt out-of-print albums because i'm a lot more interested in those vs. concert tickets.

stephen beat me to it re: reselling cds

subquestion to my last comments: who is more gullible, the person who pays $120 for a white stripes ticket, or the person who pays $150 for a pre-major label Linkin Park release?

TS: out of print CD/vinyl vs. out of print concert tickets

I just think you're a tool for not giving those people their money back when the show was cancelled and being proud of this. But yeah, lol, law of the jungle. You the man.

It's pretty obvious people will pay more for sold out tickets on eBay than the retail price, the problem is people just stacking up on tickets with nothing but the intention to exploit whatever demand. It's not clever, it's just being asshole.

sorry, being an asshole, that is...

To quote the overpraised Maynard James Keenan here: "If I'm the man then you're the man and he's the man as well, so you can point that fucking finger up your ass."

among other reasons, i mainly had a no refunds policy so that when i sold the tickets a few months in advance, i could go ahead and invest the money elsewhere -- and at the time, it went straight into fall tuition for my senior year of college. the last thing i wanted was to have to pull $500 out of my ass if the shows were cancelled (which they were) and fall into a bit of debt because of it.

i might reiterate for you that i stated in plain english, "sorry, no refunds if the show is cancelled." so you're wrong, there was no fucking law of the jungle. it's called a refund policy, my policy was no refunds, and the buyers were aware of that from day 1.

also: yes, i admitted it's an asshole thing to do to resell tickets, and that i don't do it on a regular basis. no i don't condone it and yes i'm guilty of having done it a few times. now get over it already.

It think that stephen - while quite possibly an asshole - is getting a bad rap on this here thread.

people who have $120 to drop on White Stripes tickets are going to emerge from this whole nasty little transaction relatively unscathed.

I like the idea that saying "I'm an asshole" somehow voids anybody else's right to call you an asshole, as if it was so obvious and couldn't we just get over it already? And yet at the same time being really indignant about the asshole-calling and trying to cite all this supply and demand, child support stuff, (except, "not really, I'm totally not broke!" so why bring it up?)... methinks the shady doth protest too much. Short version, it's tough to layer anything on top of "I'm an asshole for doing this" that makes it into a defense of the indefensible. I don't give a shit about concert scalping but this cognitive dissonance business is wack.

Asshole Admits To Being Asshole In Supreme Asshole Move

I'm far too righteous for my own good, only ever looking for face value for tickets I don't need. I'm sure I wouldn't like the people I'm selling to, so I really should just get as much money out of them as possible...

The thing that always comes to my mind in conversations like this and when the government says WHAT TO DO ABOUT TICKET TOUTING is why isn't there any kind of returns policy for unwanted/unneeded tickets? Especially for sellout events. That'd put the (invariably cockney) touts who hang around the venue out of business immediately.

why would a return policy from the concert venue prevent unwanted tickets from selling over face value?

i don't think there's anything particularly assholish about this at all.

the only way to stop this is to put in place some kind of id matching system, so that the person who made the purchase is the ONLY one who can get into the show, more like a "password" than a ticket (every show is all will-call basically). how many smaller venues are going to get with that? or bigger venues for that matter? and then what do you do with someone buying a ticket for a friend, or subbing one person for another at the last minute?

nice how we have a whole thread of dudes calling someone an asshole w/o much thought about how to prevent this supreme asshole move

To reiterate, I don't think ticket-touting makes you an asshole ("I don't give a shit about concert scalping"), but stephen's post above just radiates with asshole attitude, which is what I was calling out.

nice how we have a whole thread of dudes calling someone an asshole w/o much thought about how to prevent this supreme asshole move

Here's an idea: he chooses not to not to be an asshole? That seems like the easiest way to prevent this supreme asshole move.

I'm not suggesting touting should be illegal (although stephen's clause not to refund in the event of a cancellation is about as enforceable as a pre-nup a lot of places). I don't even think it's possible to make it illegal without too much collateral damage (CD selling, etc.). The whole "but how do we ban touting?" thing is a red herring. Not everything that is indefensible should be illegal.

I think this is the bit that is being called assholish:

and i sold each ticket on eBay (within the next 48 hours) for $120 apiece. then the show was cancelled and i got my initial $40 investment back on each ticket, and didn't give refunds to the buyers cause that was my policy as stated in the auctions.

especially if he got the refunds for each ticket and didn't pass on anything to the buyers, which is how this reads (and if so would be beyond assholish, frankly).

Yeah, but the folks agreed to his terms! If I managed to snag tickets to a gig I considered to be THE GIG (which white stripes would never be for me, but to some folks they're like zepplin or somethin'), I'd just roll with it. Plus, who knows that those folks weren't turning around and selling them too? I went to a modest mouse show where I payed triple face value and had like 5 kids following me for blocks trying to outbid each other for my ticket. The value is in the perception. Someone who paid 120 for the tix was probably more upset that they didn't get rocked by the stripes than losing money cuz the shitty drummer girl succumbed to neurosis.

Someone who paid 120 for the tix was probably more upset that they didn't get rocked by the stripes than losing money cuz the shitty drummer girl succumbed to neurosis.

Sure, if I got kicked in the balls and slapped in the face I'd be more upset about the kick in the balls. That doesn't mean I wouldn't care that I was slapped in the face. The cancellation wasn't something stephen could do anything about. The fact that other human beings lost $120 was. That is why he is an asshole, whether it was in the terms or not. There's a reason punitive contract terms like that are often legally unenforceable -- to protect people from assholes. Also, he is even bigger asshole for disingenuously pretending he thinks he an asshole.

note: we're in agreement about the (totally irrelevant) merits of The White Stripes.

especially if he got the refunds for each ticket and didn't pass on anything to the buyers, which is how this reads (and if so would be beyond assholish, frankly).

It was in his terms. Why would he?

This isn't an "is stephen an asshole" thread, its a defend the indefensible thread. Should be more DON'T KNOCK THE HUSTLE pics and stuff.

well, there are two kinds of refunds - he could refund them the $120 they paid him, and get the refund himself from the promoter, and be at 0. or he could get the refund from the promoter, and pass it on to the buyers, who'd each then be $80 down. or he could get the refund from the promoter, not pass it on to the buyers, who are then $120 down. if it's the last of these we're talking about it seems particularly lame to me - if i bought a ticket 2nd hand i'd kinda presume that if it got cancelled it'd be me who'd get the refund by taking the ticket back to the box office.

Yeah, but the folks agreed to his terms!

I've bought $15 computer stuff off ebay with a "we're going to make it so difficult to do anything about it if it doesn't work that you may as well not bother" disclaimer thinking "what are the chances of that? it'll be fine" and was pretty annoyed at myself, them and ebay when it didn't work. I can imagine doing the same for a ticket if I really wanted to go that much and feeling kicked in the teeth if I'd lost $120 in the process.

I'd feel kicked in the teeth if I paid $120 and had to watch the white stripes!

I'd feel kicked in the teeth if I paid $120 and had to watch the white stripes!

OTM

Also, he is even bigger asshole for disingenuously pretending he thinks he an asshole.

i wasn't disingenuously pretending anything; i admitted honestly that it wasn't exactly the nicest thing to do. like others are pointing out, i also fully disclosed my terms to the buyers, who knew before buying that in the case of a cancellation, there was no refund policy. i gave full disclosure in my auction terms, and while it makes me something of an asshole (to some of you) to have those terms in the first place, there's nothing dishonest or wrong about setting terms for an auction, then sticking to them.

speaking for myself, i've bought tickets on craigslist many times with no "refund policy" to speak of -- and been burned once (to see Yo La Tengo earlier this year, actually) -- but you know, i knew what i was getting into and agreed to buy the tickets anyway. and that was that.

This isn't an "is stephen an asshole" thread, its a defend the indefensible thread.

unfortunately ILM doesn't always work as intended -- i replied to the thread with an honest answer, and i get slammed while the thread is derailed entirely in the process. too many people on this thread pretending they haven't ever made a questionable move in their lives, ever.

the whole thing sorta reminds me of this tagline:

http://www.campaignbuttons-etc.com/cause27A.jpg

whoops lemme try that again

http://www.campaignbuttons-etc.com/cause27A.jpg

if i bought a ticket 2nd hand i'd kinda presume that if it got cancelled it'd be me who'd get the refund by taking the ticket back to the box office.

yeah, some venues are starting to do this more. i saw the Smashing Pumpkins a few days ago; the concert was originally postponed about 2 weeks earlier, and if you couldn't attend the rescheduled date, you had to mail in the physical tickets to the box office to receive a refund check mailed back to you. works better for secondhand buyers this way, no doubt.

Yeah, quit trashing Stephen the asshole and trash the real assholes who made him act like a jerk by providing him with a unwise fanbase and then backing out of their shows because the world is a scary place.

Alright, I will now stop making fun of White Stripes. I will now make fun of Stephen for taking his loot from Stripes tickets and spending it on Smashing Pumpkins tickets.

Why is doing this indefensible? Cf. real estate, venture capital, etc. I guess the closest thing to an argument against doing this was above when someone said "help another music fan out, you know?" The idea seems to be that I shouldn't make an *excessive* profit on music-related things. One key here is what counts as "excessive", but that's not the whole matter. It's also the old indie thing of how to mix music with commerce. Probably this "defend the indefensible" would split on those old grounds, if it ever got that far.

too many people on this thread pretending they haven't ever made a questionable move in their lives, ever.

You appear to be confusing someone disagreeing with you and someone saying that they are perfect.

xpost.

Xpost-It is indefensible because people should not take money from gullible folks who will pay too much for a crappy show.

people should not take money from gullible folks who will pay too much for a crappy show.

to a good amount of non-elitist people who don't spend all day on music-related Internet message boards, the White Stripes are the best band in the world right now, and many of them would spend $120 two or three times over for those tickets, if necessary. how are music fans "gullible" for paying for what they enjoy? i.e., just because you're too cool for Jack and Meg doesn't mean everyone else is.

One key here is what counts as "excessive", but that's not the whole matter.

if there's a buyer willingly and knowingly paying a certain amount for a music-related item, whether piece of OOP vinyl or sold-out concert ticket or whatever else, and it makes them happy to buy that item for that price, then i really don't see anything excessive about it.

How did you go about getting a refund from the promoter?

in this particular case - it was refunded automatically to my credit card.

When it comes to making a thread all about him, stephen is like early LJ without the charm.

(stephen: if you disagree with this then the best way to prove it is not to post to this thread again, since you've made your views on touting clear.)

for the record, i'm entirely okay with discussion shifting back to the original question. i'm not trying to seek attention here, it's just that admitting to reselling tickets on an anti-reselling thread is like a magnet for personal criticism and insults.

Shut up.

do you think the same about people buying limited edition records and selling them on, for example?

Depending on the circumstances, yeah why not? Ok if you're just crate digging and come across some rare vinyl that otherwise would have gone undiscovered then sure, coin it in. That's to a large extent what the whole antiques trade is based on. But if some limited commodity is initally readily available to everyone, and you pull it out of circulation just to line your pockets - asshole. Fuck a free market.

HAHA thanks dom (xpost)

I started a thread on hoarding limited records a few weeks back which got roundly ignored: How much of a dick move is it, in the grand scheme of things, to buy records with a view to selling them in the future at higher prices? but it's all good. Was quite surprised to see ESOJ being that blithely accepting actually

stephen, to gleefully take way over the odds off people then make even more back again and NOT refund the difference makes you a total cock. it's not that difficult to comprehend - you'd still end up quids in but you'd soften the blow for these people you skanked. to not do that and to brag on a message board *and* quote ebay selling rules makes you a shit, a real dirty toerag. but you know this already, right?

Was quite surprised to see ESOJ being that blithely accepting actually

well i wouldn't say it was blithe acceptance, it's just one of the "evils" i've had to learn to deal with as a collector/fan.. i gave up getting shitty about it a long time ago

http://music.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,2222013,00.html

I see bands want a slice of that ticket-touting moolah now. Fuck's sake. Heaven forbid they don't want fans ripped off, no they just want their cut.

cuntscuntscuntscunts

Radiohead, Robbie Williams and Arctic Monkeys joined calls yesterday for a levy to be added to tickets resold on the web to allow musicians to claw back some of the profits made by touts and fans.

The acts' managers, together with about 400 other artists, including KT Tunstall and the Verve, said the move was vital to bring some regulation and rigour to a market they described as "the wild west".

They proposed the creation of a Resale Rights Society, which would collect a fee from each ticket sold on eBay and other websites such as Seatwave, Viagogo and GetMeIn.com that have sprung up to satisfy the demand to trade concert tickets.

Wait till blogger Lefsetz sees this. Actually, wait to the major labels now pushing 360 degree deals with bands (where they share in all of the revenue for everything supposedly in exchange for marketing efforts) see it. But yea, not much concern show for consumers here with this proposal.

This is just Radiohead getting their revenge on fans who paid 1p for In Rainbows.

Jeez, why don't the promoters just sell all the tickets by auction themselves? Stagger the availibility for maximum profit incentive? Bet it's legal.

i just heard on the radio this morning that van halen are being accused of making a deal with their promoters who are holding back tickets and putting them on ticketmaster's ticketexchange site (auction site), essentially scalping their own tickets. although I don't think this is anything new so I don't know why it's news (I guess the tickets showed up on ticketexchange within a minute or two of tickets going on sale, so it was some kind of proof).

but if you think seeing van halen is worth paying $2k, I just feel sorry for you, and don't necessarily see the evil in it.

so why is this listed as "having new answers" at the top of ILM?

OK never mind, it was because I had it bookmarked.

pretty cool, actually.

trent reznor to fans: yes i know, it sucks:

I assure you nobody in the NIN camp supplies or supports the practice of supplying tickets to these re-sellers because it's not something we morally feel is the right thing to do. We are leaving money on the table here but it's not always about money.
Being completely honest, it IS something I've had to consider. If people are willing to pay a lot of money to sit up front AND ARE GOING TO ANYWAY thanks to the rigged system, why let that money go into the hands of the scalpers? I'm the one busting my ass up there every night. The conclusion really came down to it not feeling like the right thing to do - simple as that.

My guess as to what will eventually happen if / when Live Nation and TicketMaster merges is that they'll move to an auction or market-based pricing scheme - which will simply mean it will cost a lot more to get a good seat for a hot show. They will simply BECOME the scalper, eliminating them from the mix.

Nothing's going to change until the ticketing entity gets serious about stopping the problem - which of course they don't see as a problem.

touting never bothered me as much as booking fees. they're fucked up. seeing people apologise for this but not for regularly using ticketmaster etc ... ehhh

I've done this once but only for a nominal profit. obv ticket brokers in general suck ass.

what's yr experience?

This story is getting a lot of play here in L.A.: https://variety.com/2019/music/news/black-keys-hundreds-turned-away-wiltern-ticketmaster-1203344146/

Honestly, this is the overcorrective reaction that I can't stand. Yeah, the resale industry is fucked, esp with revelations that bands are actually releasing thousands tickets for sale directly to third party resellers. But there are people that pay it - sometimes when I'm traveling for work or pleasure, I'll find out an act is in town that I want to see but the tix are above face value, and I just pay it.

But how is that more fucked than denying people who can't make a show due to some emergency from selling to someone who can? Is this going to endear fans to the band more when buyers got kept out of the show?

Non-transferrable is really fucking stupid and no matter my opinion of scalping, Black Keys are the ones who look like shitheads here. same as when Smashing Pumpkins did the same thing in 1996.

"We wanted to ensure fans got into the venue at the low price we set for them. Instead they didn't get let in at all! but fuck em, they're not true fans!"

You'd think there would be a way to make them digitally transferable but only at the price they were purchased at.

Black Keys are the ones who look like shitheads here

seems it would be fine if ticketmaster had a feature allowing you to return your ticket for face value

the tale of a woman from Boyle Heights who’d spent $700 on three tickets for herself and her two young children and waited in line for two hours, only to be told after finally passing through security that the tickets weren’t valid, sending her back onto the sidewalk with a crying 9-year-old.

lol tbh

if Ticketmaster had a feature allowing you to return tickets, that'd be a step, but there are plenty of people who are paying for the privilege of getting into a sold out event, whether we were too slow to get tickets, or perhaps didn't think they'd be able to go, or traveled somewhere and found the show on their doorstep unexpectedly.

yeah $700 is much more than I'd spend for three tickets to ANYBODY, much less Black Keys, but hey, it's their money. lol @ the idea that anybody in the 3rd party markets was in any way significantly hurt by what the Black Keys did.

plus I mean they used Ticketmaster, how much do they really care about markup

I assume the venue is LiveNation/Ticketmaster only, so they probably didn’t have a choice there.

Seems like if a band does their best to make sure True Fans have the best shot at buying tix (maybe release the code via email right before they go on sale?), then if some fans end up reselling, that’s the breaks.

the other thing, the article made it sound like if you sent a ticket barcode from one phone to another, i.e. someone buying the ticket as a gift, it would also not be honored, the software would recognize it and disallow the scan?

Right, seems it’s a “dynamic barcode”

the argument between stephen and everybody else upthread is always entertaining

The most depressing result of the consolidated, decentralized ticket scalping operations is sitting in the near-premium area in a large seated venue only to have the seats near you stay empty throughout the entire show when they were sold out online.

he went on to post as ilxor, iirc?

If they're purely interested in making sure tix only wind up in the hands of 'true fans', seems like the lower the ticket price the less likely that is, tbh. If theyre interested in keeping ticket prices low by stopping scalping that's commendable, but the whole idea hinges the nontransferability being super clear to everyone right upfront, so that resellers don't bother buying tix in the first place. If you hide that feature in the fine print it defeats the whole purpose.

i just did this with madonna tickets. I bought some for us, and then 4 additional on another night, and resold them on stubhub for enough to cover the cost of all the tickets. yeah I suppose that was kind of shitty but whatever.

honestly anyone who pays to see madonna deserves to get ripped off.

rude

Just try to understand, she's given all she can

It's starting to get that the efforts to combat 'scalping' are making legit "I can't go" resale more difficult.

I have a ticket to a small club show I can't go to Sunday that I'm trying to sell. These are harder to sell on StubHub, since they're GA shows, so you pretty much have to sell at a loss to move them (plus you lose fees). But in this case, I had no choice - the show wasn't listed, it takes days to get a new show added, and this particular promoter actually calls Stubhub to take his shows down from being listed. Craigslist is useless as nobody looks on CL for small events like this. I've tried with no success multiple times.

So I go to the event page to offer the ticket, under face value, and make very clear that I'm not one of the 3 million bots offering tickets. The promoters know me, I go to a billion of their shows. The page is moderated to cut out the bots offering tix. Today, I find out they didn't approve my post so it never went up.

so now outside of posting it for sale on my own FB page, which will have less success than it would have on the event page itself due to the algorithms, I have no real options to sell, even at a loss. It's an Eventbrite ticket, they have no marketplace of their own.

I could ask for a refund but it seems stupid - meh.

it seems less stupid than spending days to sell it at a loss

right, cos making zero money back is better than making some money back. good tip!

literally think you just pop up to be really fucking annoying sometimes

nevermind, I misread you completely. sorry.

:)

https://variety.com/2020/biz/news/pearl-jam-congressmen-boss-ticket-reform-act-flawed-1203506450/

https://variety.com/2020/biz/news/pearl-jam-congressman-rejects-boss-ticket-reform-1203508207/

Don’t know more than what’s in this articles, but not sure I get Pearl Jam’s position here... “Non-transferable ticketing” is not good, right?

(for the reasons discussed this thread, beginning last September)

it's inconvenient, sure, but it also really helps defend from scalping surely?

I'm sure it does, but it also seems "anti-consumer," steers folks toward buying that "ticket insurance" offered at check-out (b/c what other recourse will you have if you can't go?), etc. It's a tricky problem for sure.

Trying to read more about the bill... the Springsteen focus in the bill's name & PR is so perfectly Jersey: https://pascrell.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=3931

This seems like a basic rundown of the bill's provisions: https://pascrell.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=3377

There are legit sanctioned ways to resell tix like Ticketmaster Resale Marketplace but then these services will set a minimum price for your tickets sometimes that is too high to garner interest.

For a sold out event, you're golden, but if it's not, you just want to recover *something*.

People will just start demanding refunds and attempting chargebacks as even ticket insurance can only be used in specific instances. Illness, you're good. Laid off, you're good. Work demands you work on a day you weren't previously scheduled? Out of luck. Someone dies but they weren't a member of your immediate family or going to the show with you? Out of luck. And the insurance inflates the already bloated sale prices of many tickets.

The resale sites aren't the primary issue as much as a symptom. The primary issue is that third parties also seem to acquire large allotments of tickets with only resale as an intent. Sometimes even Ticketmaster has promoted this.

I admit I don't know how to stop that but while making tickets non transferable might curb scalping, it just about guarantees empty seats in the house, and that many people who didn't want to pay another $20 for ticket insurance, or who missed for a non-covered reason will take a bath on it. And possibly stop attending.

And how would gifts work?