Fighting Predatory Ticketing: Protecting Artists and Fans from Price Gouging

Concert ticketing has become a rigged system where bots, scalpers, and deceptive platforms exploit fans and undermine artists' ability to connect with their audiences at fair prices. Speculative ticket sales, hidden fees, and price manipulation have turned what should be a straightforward transaction into a predatory marketplace that enriches middlemen while gouging consumers.

• Artists lose control over who can afford to see their shows when speculative resellers capture ticket value that should flow to creators and venues
• Fans are priced out of live music experiences by predatory markup schemes that can inflate ticket prices by 300-500% above face value
• Economic exploitation diverts revenue from the artists, venues, and workers who actually create live music experiences to parasitic middlemen
• Cultural access is undermined when live music becomes a luxury good accessible only to wealthy consumers rather than diverse audiences
• The live music ecosystem suffers as inflated secondary market prices damage the long-term sustainability of touring and venue operations

MAC champions artists' fundamental right to control how their work is sold and accessed. Artists should be able to set resale price caps on their own tickets, ban speculative sales of tickets that don't exist, and protect their fans from exploitation.

The current system treats concert tickets like an unregulated stock market where speculators use bots to manipulate supply and inflate prices. This is a rigged casino where bad actors always win while artists lose control over their audiences and fans get gouged for wanting to experience live music. We support aggressive enforcement against bad actors who use technology to game the system.

Concert tickets aren't commodities to be traded for profit - they're artists' invitations to their audiences. When speculators can manipulate that relationship for financial gain, they're stealing value from creators and exploiting fans. Artists created the work, artists should control the terms.

We are a member of the Fix The Tix coalition and support this model legislation.