Much ado about nothing. Grandstanding. A joke.
In reality the order says nothing. Other than ticket scalpers make a lot of money and they must pay taxes on their revenue.
Oh yeah, DOGE just gutted the IRS…who’s going to enforce that? Where are all the IRS engineers with time to dedicate to researching the receipts of brokers.
As for the BOTS act… It’s been on the books for years, but it’s been ineffective because there’s been no money/assets delegated for ENFORCEMENT!
And in a government where Musk is cutting willy-nilly, where is the extra manpower to focus on…TICKET SCALPING?
Let’s be clear, scalpers provide a service. If you can’t get in line online and waste hours trying to purchase what oftentimes is a bad seat, you can pay a premium after the fact to the scalper to get the ticket you want. Hell, a lot of the great tickets are not available on the on sale to boot! There are pre-sales and holdbacks and… I’ll admit the scalpers and their bots are a huge problem, but no one is forcing anybody to buy a concert ticket. And the dirty little secret is almost all of the people paying exorbitant prices for secondary market tickets were thrilled to be at the venue, THEY ENJOYED THE SHOW!
So, once again, where is the problem?
High prices for concert tickets? Well, if the acts themselves try to capture that revenue the public bitches that they’re greedy. As for paperless/tying the ticket to the purchaser…the public is against that, because they want to be able to scalp their tickets themselves!
Concert ticket pricing and availability is a problem, but nothing in Trump’s executive order is going to address this.
Price transparency? Big evil Live Nation has been arguing for this for years. It’s a game, no different from buying anything in America today. There’s the price of the car, and what you pay when you walk out the door. And there’s no addressing the breakdown of these fees… So the acts can hide behind the “face value” of the ticket and accuse Ticketmaster, which gets little of the fees, for being greedy! Talk about not having clean hands.
The FTC proposing regulations? Isn’t this what Trump and the Republicans want to get rid of? Don’t they want to simplify all processes?
As for a report… That ain’t never going to pass the DOGE smell test. Isn’t this what they’re getting rid of, soft costs? You’re going to spend all that money creating a report? And it does cost money. And usually nothing happens thereafter. This is antithetical to the DOGE and Trump ethos!
But Trump owes Kid Rock a solid. And this was as much as he could deliver.
Rock has a long history of trying to rein in the abuses in the ticketing world. I applaud him for that. But this executive order is a joke.
Too many people are making too much money off of concert tickets for there to be any change. And the government doesn’t have enough money and manpower to solve this problem, because how big of a problem is it? Very tiny.
We’ve got ignorant fans who believe they’re entitled to sit in the front row for twenty bucks. Since they listened to the music, a seat should be guaranteed!
Forget the law of supply and demand. This is kind of like the inane advocates of a penny a stream at Spotify. Did they learn any math? Spotify doesn’t take in enough revenue to pay every artist a penny per stream, nowhere even close, the company would be bankrupt nearly instantly.
But it feels good to beat up on Spotify. It feels good to beat up on Ticketmaster. People can’t handle the truth.
And all this executive order does is obfuscate. It makes people believe something is being done when in reality…
It’s the same as it ever was.
