Live Nation Posts Robust 2022 Year-End Results, Projects Blockbuster 2023; and Launches FAIR Ticketing Act

variety.com:

Jem Aswad Senior Music Editor Live Nation posted robust results in an earnings report encompassing the full 2022 year and its fourth quarter released Thursday, and looks ahead to a blockbuster 2023 amid ongoing government attention to its Ticketmaster division after the debacle surrounding last fall’s on-sale for Taylor Swift’s stadium tour.

On a very busy Thursday for the company, it also launched the FAIR Ticketing Act in an effort to combat excesses in the secondary ticketing market, and plans to release a statement in response to one issued earlier in the day by Senators Amy Klobuchar and Mike Lee, who led last month’s controversial Senate hearing on the ticketing industry.

Details of the FAIR Ticketing act can be found here, but broadly speaking, its main tenets state that “artists should decide resale rules,” which would be an effort to allow artists to take the lead in preventing exploitative prices on the secondary market; “make it illegal to sell speculative tickets,” addressing scalpers’ habit of tricking fans into buying tickets that do not yet exist; “expand the BOTS Act,” to combat the widespread use of ticket-buying bots on the secondary market; “crack down on resale sites that are safe havens for scalpers,” which would force secondary-market sites to police the activity on their platforms more aggressively; and “mandate all-in-pricing nationally,” which would address the processing and other fees that often are not revealed until very late in the sale process.

While idealistic in ways, these measures, if enacted as stated, would address at least some of the very legitimate complaints that have been leveled at Ticketmaster and the ticketing industry overall in recent years.